Spring 2012 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 1 & 2: Dissecting Display: The Visual Politics of Museum Exhibition
MWR 8-8:50 and MWR 9-9:50
Laura John
We’ve all visited museums, but how often have we wondered about the
reasoning beyond the presentation of objects and narratives in those
spaces? Museums preserve and display cultural heritage, but they also
help create that heritage. In that way, they say as much about ‘us’ (the
onlookers) as they do about ‘them’ (the looked at). This course will
explore how museums function as cultural institutions by looking closely
and critically at the museum space in a variety of lights.
Texts
include “The Exhibitionary Complex” by Tony Bennett, Michael Baxandall’s
“Exhibiting Intentions”, and “Transforming Objects into Artifacts” by
Bernard Cohn. Students will also analyze case examples of museum spaces
throughout the course.
Class discussion, peer reviews, and frequent revision of written work will aid in the development of analytical skills throughout the semester. Ultimately, our goal in this class is to develop critical thinking skills as we explore the politics of museum exhibition.
UWS 24a: Growing Up Victorian: 19th-century Children's Literature and Theories of Human Development
MWR 9-9:50
Jesse Foster-Stout
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.
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 7a, sections 1 & 2: Music in Television
MWR 9-9:50, MWR 12-12:50
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 19b: From Novel to Film
MWR 9-9:50
Carlos Martinez
Why is it that so many great novels seem butchered by their cinematic adaptation? How often have you seen a film get one of your favorite books all wrong? Clearly something is lost, or perhaps added, in such moments, but it is often difficult to pin down exactly what did not work. This class investigates this problem. We will analyze various film adaptations in order to develop a method for understanding what happens when narrative goes from prose to film. Our key primary texts include Sean Penn’s adaption of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Our focus will be on determining what prose can do that film cannot. Close readings of moments that crossover from book to film will allow us to interrogate what happens when words become images and narrative becomes montage. Through an examination of various critical staples on narrative, film adaptation, and auteur theory—Seymour Chatman’s “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)”, Dudley Andrew’s discussion of adaptation in Concepts in Film Theory, Andrew Sarris’ “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” and Peter Wollen’s discussions of auteur theory in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema—we will then hone the skills necessary to answer these questions critically and convincingly. Discussion, writing, peer reviewing, and revision will form the foundation of our analysis in this course. Together we will work toward articulating a method for understanding film adaptation that will allow us to confront the practice anew.
UWS 6a, sections 1 & 2: The Decay of the American City
MWR 12-12:50, MWR 1-1:50
Nathaniel Hodes
At a time when e-commerce makes trade and social relations an increasingly global affair, many American cities are committing to stemming sprawl, getting off the grid, growing up, not out--in other words, consolidating and defining themselves as physical places. But what makes a city? Is it mere geography and census figures; is it a staging ground for sidewalk interactions, a laboratory of ideas and economics, or an organically evolving matrix of buildings and parks? In this course, we will examine both the reality and representation of urban reform efforts-from Jane Jacobs's observations of New York sidewalks to HBO's The Wire to Richard Florida's socioeconomic theory of the "Creative Class"--asking along the way, how does rethinking American cities affect the way we live in them?
UWS 9a: Monsters, Murder and Detection in Victorian Literature
MWR 12-12:50
Erin Erhart
Victorian England was filled with monsters. From Jack the Ripper to Dracula, the Victorian world was haunted by both real and imaginary figures of terrible power. Marked by dramatic shifts in the way that people viewed the universe, time and the role of the divine, the Victorian period was a hotbed of competing systems of faith, logic and government. It was from this context that some of the most recognizable figures of contemporary culture emerged: Sherlock Holmes, Van Helsing, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Invisible Man. All of these characters share a fascination with science and the supernatural, a theme that we will pick up on and develop in the course. Questions that we will address will include, what is the relationship of science to the supernatural? And how does technology play a critical role in the changing ways that people conceptualized their own lives and subjectivities? Why is it that detective fiction emerges at this time as a major theme? How are themes of addiction addressed within the texts? And how does gender and class inform our understanding of the sometimes tenuous line between hero and monster? Lastly, we will turn from the Victorian period to our own time, examining how the themes so prevalent in the past help to inform the way that we see the world around us today.
Texts explored in this class will include Sherlock Holmes, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, John Polidori's "The Vampyre" and the The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells. We will also be examining the science of the time using primary documents, and looking at the work of Charles Darwin and his contemporaries. By establishing a context for examining these texts, we will then have the means of seeing how contemporary texts and movements reflect Victorian concerns. Contemporary texts taken into consideration will include CSI, the BBC TV series Sherlock, the Steampunk movement, the comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the movie The Wild West.
To develop the themes of the course, and as the course is a University Writing Seminar, students will use critical theory and cultural texts to develop their own readings of these characters and concepts while developing their analytical writing skills within the university. This course will help you cultivate the necessary faculties for writing successful academic essays, which will serve you throughout your career at Brandeis. You will develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the process of composition and revision, and cultivate crucial research skills that will help you make the most of the information resources available at Brandeis.
UWS 10a: The Victorian Novella
MWR 12-12:50
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 12a, sections 1 & 2: Comedy and Sympathy
MWR 12-12:50, 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 17a: A Woman's Place is in the (Haunted) House: Unsettling the Domestic
MWR 12-12:50
Laura Hill
Are ghosts real? Regardless of your answer to that question, their existence can be traced through many texts; haunting is useful as a trope to transmit stories and information, to scare but also to edify, to create narrative continuity with the past but simultaneously to challenge the status quo. In this class, we will explore a specific category of ghost stories: women's stories of haunted houses written in the twentieth-century United States, an era of upheaval in American society and culture, particularly with regard to the role(s) of women. These discomfiting tales reproduce domesticity in order to confront it with other possibilities, paranormal or not. The primary texts we will examine will include "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson; and I'm Looking through You: Growing up Haunted, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. We will use critical theory to discuss the textual realities of both home and ghost, investigating the multivalent possibilities of supernatural threats to the private sphere. By the end of the course, students will have written three essays: a close reading essay; a lens essay (one which uses one text to analyze another); and a research essay. This class is a University Writing Seminar. As such, its primary goal is to prepare students for college-level academic writing. Students will develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the process of composition and revision and cultivate crucial research skills that will help them make the most of the information resources available at Brandeis.
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 it shapes our interpersonal relationships, paying special attention 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 the Browning poem, "Love Among the Ruins," 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 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-or 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 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 3b: Migration Stories: Displacement and Emplacement in the Modern World
MWR 1-1:50
Anna Jaysane-Darr
What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be "out of place"? American fiction and memoir has long been enamored of the immigrant story, a story that both illuminates and questions the myth of the American Dream. These stories also give us an opportunity to take a step back and examine how allegiance and belonging are constructed, and how they can be taken apart and revised. Is culture something solid and unchanging, or is it fluid and unstable? In this course we will look at the fiction and memoir of migration and displacement through the lens of contemporary anthropological theories of culture and the nation. These explorations will give us ample material to use in our primary work, which is critical thinking and essay writing, including thesis, structure, analysis, and argumentation.
UWS 5b: Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
MWR 1-1:50
Lydia Fash
In regards to his first detective tale, Edgar Allan Poe once asked: "Where is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which I have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?" The ingenuity, of course, lies in the construction of a genre wherein the reader watches the detective make sense of a seemingly inexplicable pattern of events. Along with other readings, this course will use a Sherlock Holmes movie, short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, and theoretical pieces by Tzvetan Todorov and Michel Foulcault to interrogate the logic of whodunits. Why is it that a woman is so often the victim, that a gritty city is usually the setting, and that a detective always manages to solve the crime? What does the genre of detective fiction reveal about gender, objectivity, and morality in the nineteenth-century? Most importantly, what does our embrace of this genre tell us about our own procedures of learning, reading, and desiring knowledge? To assist students in developing their writing process, this discussion-based seminar will emphasize drafting, revising, peer editing, and conferencing. Ultimately, the goal of Detective Fiction is to further develop the critical thinking and writing skills necessary to university and post-university writing.
UWS 16a: Representing Women in Twentieth-Century AmericaTR 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 4a: Jazz Age Fiction
TR 5-6:20
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 decade (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 5a, sections 1 & 2: Current Events and the Rhetoric of Political Commentary
MWR 9-9:50 and TR 5-6:20
Joseph Wensink
Stephen
Colbert famously characterizes today’s politics as dominated by the principle
of “truthiness.” If Colbert is right, how is it that gut feeling has come to
carry more weight than the force of brute facts? What is it about the rhetoric
of political discourse that has such power to supplant facts with feelings?
Even if we might not agree that discourse has devolved quite so far as Colbert
suggests, it is nonetheless indisputable that political rhetoric crucially
shapes public opinion and influences policy decisions. This remains true
whether the rhetoric clouds the issues and misleads the public, or whether it
remains faithful to the principles of rational, fact-based argument.
This course follows debates in American domestic and international policy in
real time, examining the rhetorical strategies of commentators and politicians
alike as they make their case to the voting public. Together we will read the
opinion pages of traditional print journalism, watch television news shows and
political satire, and view influential news blogs and political candidate
websites. Our analyses will be informed by classical theories of rhetoric put
forth by Aristotle and Cicero. As a writing class, we will seek not only to
analyze the rhetoric of others, but also to devise rhetorical strategies of our
own. This will enable us to produce nuanced and incisive papers—papers that
treat the serious political issues of our time with rigor, depth, and the
attention to fact-based analysis that they deserve.
UWS 6b: The Modern Celt: Nineteenth-Century Celtic Cultural Nationalism
TR 5-6:20
Christy Murphy
Who is a real "Celt"? What does the term "Celtic" actually mean? The term "Celtic" has been variously used as an archaeological label, a linguistic categorization, an ancient, pre-modern cultural tradition, and a modern political and cultural invention. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Celtic cultural nationalists participated in the evolution of the term "Celtic" by defining, establishing and expressing constructs of Celtic identity in ways that inspired Irish political nationalists to take collective action to create the Irish nation. This course focuses on the role of cultural nationalists during the nineteenth century in transforming an ethnic nation into a modern political nation –– Ireland.
In The Modern Celt: Nineteenth-Century Celtic Cultural Nationalism, we will examine the role that cultural nationalism has played in Celtic nation formation. While participants from the six Celtic nations will be discussed, primary emphasis will be on Irish and Scottish figures and nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. Texts will include selections from nationalism historians such as Anthony Smith, Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Renan, the novels Waverley by Sir Walter Scott, as well as historical documents and writings by people instrumental in Irish nation formation such as Douglas Hyde, William Butler Yeats and Patrick Pearse. Using these materials, we will examine how and to what degree elements of Celtic cultural nationalism influenced Celtic political nationalism and nation formation. Through class discussion and critical reading assignments, we will look at how Celtic identity has been conceived historically and explore the historical significance of a constructed Celtic identity or culture.
Since this course is a University Writing Seminar (UWS), the main focus will be learning and practicing the standards for college-level, academic writing. You will develop and improve your composition skills through multiple, structured writing assignments and revisions, peer group workshops, and conferences. You will experiment with a variety of writing activities and assignments including close reading, lens, and research-based essays that can be done on a film, text, or work of art. Through class discussion and a critical reading of the texts, you will develop analytical skills that will be useful as you continue your academic career at Brandeis.UWS 7b: Food and Power
TR 5-6:20
Sarah Sutton
Our oranges come from California, our vegetables from Mexico, our bananas from Central America. Over the course of the twentieth 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, paying close attention to the way that our modern system of industrialized agriculture developed. This course will ask you to explore the various meanings Americans have attached to their food over the past century; how and why the things we choose to eat affect people and landscapes thousands of miles from where we eat them; and alternatives to conventional agriculture. This course will also foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing as we consider what the journey from farm to table can teach us about American society and culture more broadly.
We will begin the course by studying early twentieth century advertisements for food as a means to better understand how farmers and advertising agents transformed agricultural products into commodities of mass consumption. Next, using the ideas of writers including Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry, we will examine the social and ecological effects of industrialized agriculture. Finally, in a research paper, students will explore 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 to turn their ideas into successful academic essays.UWS 8b: You Are Now My Enemy...
TR 5-6:20
Tina Sherman
The Hebrew Bible contains many accounts of frenemies and nemeses, but these are not just stories of battles won and lost. The Bible has trash-talk. The Bible has spin. It has intrigue and betrayal. In this course, we will examine a variety of biblical texts about enemies, and we'll discuss such questions as: Who is the enemy? How is the enemy portrayed? How is the enemy treated (both by the characters within the account and by the author of the account)? When you read between the lines of a particular text, what can you learn about the politics and perceptions that shaped the author's thinking?
The course will begin with a study of the complexity of enemy and frenemy relationships in the Bible through a close reading of a specific biblical text such as 1 Kings 18, in which Elijah engages in a contest with the prophets of Baal to determine who has the more powerful god. For the lens essay, we will study satirical and propagandistic depictions of the enemy, looking at the ways in which irony, ridicule, and caricature are used by biblical authors in different types of texts (narrative, prophetic, wisdom, etc.). Finally, the research paper will allow you to explore a "biblical enemies" topic of your choice. The primary goal of a University Writing Seminar is to prepare students for college-level academic writing. Students will learn to engage critically with texts, organize and develop their thoughts, and integrate outside sources to enhance their arguments. Peer reviews, individual conferences, class discussion, and revisions will help students refine the style, grammatical form, organization, and overall quality of their analytical writing.
UWS 9b, sections 1 & 2: Haunted Houses: Tales of Terror at Home in Gothic Fiction
MW 5-6:20, TR 5-6:20
Bendta Schroeder
A movie can hardly qualify as a horror flick if we don't see a frightened heroine being chased down some dark corridor by some even darker villain, monster, or other terrifying being-this image is so ubiquitous that even parodies of it, such as in the Scream franchise, are a tad cliché by this point. But even the most common cliché got its start somewhere. In this case, the gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, where the dark corridor was just about always in a castle and the heroine was almost always being chased by a man with dark designs on her virtue, her safety, her property, or all three-that is, this stock image of the horror genre got its start as a thinly disguised metaphor the perils of femininity and domesticity.
Over three units, this course will explore why this image had such a hold on the late eighteenth-century imagination, how this image has been adapted to the modern genres of television and film, and how changing ideas of gender and sexuality has changed the meaning of the imperiled heroine in the haunted house. The close reading unit will take on the mistress of gothic horror, Ann Radcliffe, where you will be asked to analyze the relationship between elements of the gothic genre and the ideals, anxieties, and fears relating to eighteenth-century domestic space in A Sicilian Romance. In the next unit, we will focus on an avid reader of Radcliffe's novels, Jane Austen, who yet wrote a parody of the gothic genre in her early novel Northanger Abbey. In a lens essay, you will explore the relationship between satire, realism, and fantasy in Austen's daylight version of the gothic nightmare. In the final unit, you will be asked to choose a facet of the gothic genre in present-day works of television and film to explore historical changes in the medium of narrative, as well as changes in how we think about gender and the domestic space. We will be using Hitchcock's Rebecca and Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer to guide our discussion.
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
MW 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 such a 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 as 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 10b: Jewish Martyrdom
MW 5-6:20
Susanna Klosko
In response to historical
instances of persecution, a Jewish tradition arose of describing victims of anti-Jewish violence as martyrs, believing that they died al-Kiddush HaShem, for the Sanctification of God's name. In this course we will look at how various historical catastrophes among the Jews of Europe have been interpreted by Jewish writers, theologians, and activists through the lens of Kiddush HaShem. More than studying the facts surrounding historical events such as the Crusades, the Chmielnicki Uprising, and the Holocaust, however, we will explore the ways in which such events challenge the parameters of Kiddush HaShem explicated by Maimonides in the 12th century. We will look at questions such as: is a martyr a hero, one who has frustrated her oppressor by taking her destiny into her own hand? Or is he a victim, allowing himself to die rather than fight back? Finally, in what contexts can a Jew be described as a martyr? Is it only when a Jew chooses to die rather than "desecrate the name of God"? Or rather can anyone who has been murdered simply because he or she is a Jew be considered a martyr?
This course will foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing as a way to explore the complexity of the Jewish martyrological tradition. In your close-reading essay you will examine Haim Hazaz's use of paradox in his short story "The Sermon." In your lens essay you will write about Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" through the context of traditional martyrological literature, specifically Rabbi Nathan Hanover's "Abyss of Despair." Finally for your research essay you will write a paper on the issues of martyrdom raised by the Holocaust. By the end of the course you will have learned how to engage with texts and analyze them in a clear and precise manner; how to formulate and present original academic ideas; and how to successfully transform an essay through the multiple stages of revision.
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'?
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 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.
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.UWS 1b: Body and Text in the 18th Century
MWR 1-1:50
Tina Van Kley
Rakes, fops, and dandies. Bawds, strumpets, and "female libertines." These are just a few of the words used to describe distracting and disruptive performances of masculinity and femininity in eighteenth-century England. In this class, we will consider a variety of texts-including poetry, drama, and prose-that represent the body as troubling, problematic, and even "grotesque" in order to better understand how the body serves as both a site and medium of cultural concerns and anxieties. Important political, social, and economic changes in the eighteenth century brought Great Britain substantially closer to being the modern nation we know today, and the body is one site where those changes were contested. Some authors we will read include Lord Rochester, Jonathan Swift, William Wycherley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Johnson, as well as historical and theoretical secondary readings. Our readings and discussions will facilitate students' introduction to college-level critical thinking and the conventions of academic writing. We will engage in a series of targeted writing exercises, workshops, and conferences, and produce three major essays over the course of the semester in order to explore the representation of the body, both in the past and today.