For Students

Spring 2010 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 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 3b1 & 2: Voice Lessons: The Discourse of Voice in America
MWR 9-10, MWR 12-1
Nick Van Kley
Voice is a powerful and multivalent metaphor. On the one hand, it often points to the profound truth of individual and cultural identity. We use it to describe the uniqueness of authors and artists. We use it to validate the authenticity of political advocates. On the other hand, it can also point to the irrational or inexplicable. The voice of God and the voices in our heads are counterparts to the logic of everyday decision-making. Including text by Charles Brockton Brown, Herman Melville and Kathy Acker, this course will examine disparate representations of voice in the American tradition and compile a glossary of the metaphor’s meanings.

This course is a University Writing Seminar. As such, its primary goal is to prepare students for college-level academic writing. While examining the implications of voice, students will learn and practice the standards of academic writing. They 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 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 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.


UWS 25a: Race, Dance, and Videotape
MWR 9-10
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 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 7b 1&2: Incidents of Travel
MWR 8-9, MWR 9-10
Laura John
Travel literature comes in many forms: the adventure novel, the documentary film, and even ethnography. These texts attempt, often successfully, to transport the spectator. Intended to present a snapshot of an ‘exotic’ landscape or culture, such texts afford the opportunity to examine an author’s cultural biases, as well as those of the intended audience. How, for instance, might such narratives problematically other their subjects? Whose perspective do such accounts privilege? What might get lost in the one-sided representation?

Texts include selections from Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1785), John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), and Robert J. Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North (1922). Students will also examine a more contemporary travel narrative of their choosing for their final assignment.

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 relationship between writer, audience, and subject in travel literature.

UWS 7a 1 & 2: Defining Satire
T, R 3-4, T, R 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 8b: Education Reform in America
T, R 3-4
Melissa Prosky
The state of public education in the United States is one of the most pressing policy issues on the public agenda. More than forty years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law, stakeholders continue to grapple with how to best reform the nation’s schools. For example, in 2002, President George W. Bush signed the bi-partisan No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated increased student standardized testing, and imposed sanctions on schools and school districts that failed to meet adequate yearly progress. In this writing seminar, students will have the opportunity to learn about education reform through a variety of perspectives, sources, and approaches. We will start with an example of change in a single classroom, illustrated in the film Stand and Deliver. From there, we will move to a broader picture of the history of reform in the U.S., as well as persistent challenges. Finally, students will have the chance to write about their own proposal for reform, based on readings from recent research. This class will challenge students to think and write critically, and hopefully gain an appreciation, of an important policy issue.


UWS 22a: Taking to the Streets
T, R 3-4
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 11a: Shakespeare and the Samurai
T, R 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 8a: Music and Noise
T, R 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 12b: How it all Began: A Look at the Creation of the "World"
T, R 3-4
Melanie Kingsley
Every culture across the world has attempted to understand the place from which they came, how their society came about, and the reason for their existence. While most sought answers in the gods, even in modern nation states mythical foundations are central to any conception of nation identity. Is it a human need to create elaborate explanations in order to legitimize why and how we exist today? In this writing seminar, we will explore the ways in which peoples through time have tried to conceptualize of the foundations of their culture or society and have subsequently depicted them in artwork. We will begin with an exploration of creation myths in the major religions of the world, the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. We will then look at indigenous creation myths from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica and how anthropologists have sought to utilize them as a lens through which social and political structures can be understood. For the research paper, students will investigate what can be thought of as a myth by looking modern “creation” myths and what they say about the culture from which it derives. Possibilities include the creation of the United States, the foundation of the European Union or the beginnings of a specific nation-state such as France or an exploration of ‘scientific explanations’ such as the Big Bang Theory and Evolutionary Theory.


UWS 13b: Mediating the "Other": Representation and Interpretation
T, R 3-4
Anna Jaysane-Darr
Media inspires an abundance of responses from pundits, parents, and policy-makers, responses ranging from utopian visions of a better future to dystopian expectations of destroyed tradition. Media is often considered to have the ability to directly affect behavior, while simultaneously viewed as “just” media, and therefore unreal. But the ethnographic study of media has revealed that processes of representation and interpretation are far more complex than that. On the one hand, representations of the “other” in American media can reveal important tropes of inclusion and exclusion, and can subtly reflect relations of exploitation and domination. On the other hand, cross-cultural studies show that different cultures often interpret the same programming differently.

This seminar will examine representations of the “other” in American media, and consider how American media is understood cross-culturally. Students will acquire analytical tools to look critically at media representations and claims made about media effects, while delving into the process of effective writing and argumentation.


UWS 14b: The Soul of Science
T, R 4-5
Bendta Schroeder
When Lord Byron proposed to his companions, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, that they each come up with a ghost story, Mary Shelley produced a tale that included no ghost—just one monster, brought to life by an ambitious scientist with a jolt of electricity. For Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster proposes the question: if a creature is “manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth,” does it count as being truly alive? Does it count as having a soul? Shelley’s question about the nature of “life itself,” the soul, and their relationship to science has fascinated writers all through the nineteenth century to the present day. In this Writing Seminar, we examine the interplay and collisions between spiritual and scientific explanations of the soul, consciousness, and “life itself” in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, science, and popular culture. We begin by examining the otherworldly psychic abilities of the protagonist of George Eliot’s 1859 novella, The Lifted Veil in the context of contemporary theories of galvanism, mesmerism, and magnetism. Then, we turn to the conflict between psychoanalysis and spirituality over the meaning of consciousness or the self by using Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic as a framework for Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, Alias Grace. For the final project, students will research modern representations of the relationship between science and the spiritual in such cultural productions as the X-Files, Supernatural, and Ghost Hunters.


UWS 15b: Minmalist Music
MWR 9-10
Peter Lane
The Minimalist movement has arguably been the most prevalent and controversial style of experimental music and art in the last century. Why has this rebellious trend become so influential? How has Minimalism been the creative conduit for many politically driven composers? Through the analysis of Minimalist concert music, film music, and opera, as well as various texts on musical aesthetics, we will discover how this artistic philosophy has formed the identity of an entire generation of American musicians and artists. 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 skills. Subject matter for writing assignments will discuss the music and artistic statements of composers such as John Adams, Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, David Lang, Terry Riley, as well as other musicians, bands, artists, architects, and writers who have been influenced by the Minimalist movement. Prior formal knowledge of music is not a requirement for this course.


UWS 16b: Existential Literature
T, R 4-5
Adam Rutledge
What is the Good Life, or How should one live? Is existence ultimately absurd, or can life be said to have meaning? Is it even reasonable to raise such questions, or is there something incoherent about their very nature? Quite often, attempts to address these fundamental human concerns have taken literary form, finding expression in stories, dialogues, parables, and poetry. This course will pair theoretical texts by authors such as Nietzsche, Dennett, Nagel, and Blond with literary works that take up existential themes, such as Plato’s Meno, Camus’s The Stranger, short stories by Flannery O’Connor, the soliloquies of Hamlet, The Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and selections from Romantic and Modernist poetry. Students will write three papers relating the theories they encounter in the course to the literature they discuss in class or discover on their own, using analytical and research techniques applicable to all disciplines.


UWS 17b: Heretics, Judaizers, Witches and Fornicators: Pre-modern Deviants and the Inquisition
T, R 4-5
Lucia Finotto
What comes to mind when we hear the word Inquisition? Torture, cruelty, oppression, secrecy; these are a few of the images most commonly associated with the Inquisition. Established to repress noncompliant thinking inside the church, and deviant social behaviors, it developed into different local Inquisitions. There is in fact, not one Inquisition; there are many. In this Writing Seminar, we move beyond common perceptions of fantacism and brutality to capture the nuances of both the Inquisition and the societies in which it took place. We begin by examining a case of heresy and witchcraft in Italy. Next, we explore the Spanish Inquisition, the most powerful judicial system of the pre-Modern world. We conclude by considering a conflict in historical interpretations of the Inquisition. Is it the forerunner of the secret police and Fascist regimes of modern times? Or was the Inquisition primarily concerned with saving souls, a ritual of penance and reconciliation? Final research might address trial records, inquisitors’ manuals, memoirs of people on death row, and/or contemporary Inquisitions.

UWS 18b: Music in the Age of New Media
T, R 4-5
James Borchers
With the advent of the internet, there has been a dramatic shift in the way many people discover, experience, and consume music. What are the effects of this shift in music culture? Should we pay for music? Should websites such as YouTube have the right to keep enormous profits generated from the free material uploaded by its users? Should we prosecute illegal downloads and can the illegal downloading of music even be regulated? What is ultimately the effect on music as an industry and on music as an art form, and with endlessly changing technology, what’s in store for the future?

This course will take a hard look at these and other questions from a variety of perspectives. We’ll look at the decline of the record industry, depicted in recent books such as Appetite for Self Destruction by Steve Knopper. We’ll examine the latest trends in the ongoing legal battles over copyright such as the current debates over the use of restricted or unrestricted material on sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and others. We’ll also survey these topics from the artists perspective, from the struggling singer-songwriter lost in a sea of online artists without the hope of earning a living, to the established acts such as Radiohead who choose to offer their work for free download.


UWS 19b: Country Music and Society
MWR 1-2
Christian Gentry
It took root in the Appalachians and the Southern states as a hybridization of many popular music forms and styles (including the Blues, gospel and Celtic music). More than a distinguishable ‘sound’, country music begat a culture in American society that spans from the rural dusty roads of the Southwest to the metropoles of the East coast. Embedded in this music is a rich story of America and all of its complications. Its rich history and cultural shape shifting enabled it to become one of the most recognizable signifiers of Americana. But, what is it about country music that paradoxically stirs so much irritability and conviviality, ire and earnestness? Through this course we will investigate this piece of American culture and attempt to answer that question and others that arise through class discussion and germane readings of text and media. You will be required to engage in a peer-to-peer classroom environment that simultaneously engages critical thinking and analytical writing. Throughout the semester we will discuss various facets of country music culture (i.e. patriotism, feminism, religion, self-fashioning, to name a few) and you will personally engage such topics in three distinct analytical essays.


UWS 23a: The Monster and Me
MWR 1-2
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 12a: The Hamlet Complex
MWR 1-2
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 22b: Making Men: The Cross-Cultural Study of Masculinity
MWR 1-2
Casey Miller
What does it mean to be a man? Every person probably has an inkling of how to begin answering this question, but, surprisingly, the academic study of men and masculinity as gendered subjects in their own right is a relatively recent phenomenon. Earlier anthropological studies typically treated men and masculinity as normal or "unmarked" categories, and while feminist scholars in the 1970s began generating increasing attention to problems of gender, gender studies are often equated with "women’s studies."

This course will seek to expose students to a range of cross-cultural meanings and practices of masculinity, including changes and crises in Chinese masculinities, semen transaction rituals in Papua New Guinea, and manifestations of machismo in Mexico as well as other popular perceptions of what it means to be a man in contemporary North America. Throughout, an emphasis will be placed on learning and practicing the fundamentals of analysis and composition in college writing. An array of class assignments and exercises such as structured essays, group discussion, and individual conferences will acquaint students with a variety of important writing and research skills and strategies, as well as a sophisticated cross-cultural understanding of men and masculinity.


UWS 10a: Staging Madness
MWR 12-1
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 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 21a: American Frontiers
T, R 4-5
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 18a: The Tread of Dreadful Feet: Horror and the Supernatural in Literature
MWR 1-2
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 23b 1 &2: Fantasy Literature
MWR 12-1, TR 4-5
Rachel Kapelle
Formulaic, predictable, escapist: all charges leveled against contemporary fantasy
literature. These charges have led to the genre’s marginalization by the academy and by
critics in general. In recent years, however, fantasy has received more attention from academics and is increasingly prominent in American pop culture as well, thanks to Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. In this course we will consider ways of classifying members of the genre and discuss works which alter typical formulas. We will also examine the dual heritage of the fantasy protagonist: part fairy tale, part contemporary novel. Finally, we will look at the political implications of fantasy literature and film to evaluate the charge that fantasy is inherently conservative and atavistic.

Our conversations will serve as raw material for the main focus of this UWS: writing in a college environment. Most courses at Brandeis require writing in some form. This seminar prepares you for your future classes by discussing standards of academic writing, the formulation of effective arguments, and methods of research. You will complete a sequence of assignments which includes three kinds of papers you will encounter throughout your college career. Knowing how to present complex positions and use resources to support them are key abilities no matter which major a student chooses; this seminar helps you to develop these skills.

UWS 24b: Arthurian Adaptations
TR 3-4
Rachel Kapelle
In a twelfth century version of the Arthurian legend, The Brut, Merlin prophesies that King Arthur will provide a “banquet” for minstrels and poets for many ages to come. This prediction has, without a doubt, come true—Arthuriana continues to flourish centuries after the king initially appeared in medieval chronicles and tales. But if Arthur originally functioned as an important figure in discussions of British national identity, how has his image changed over time and what does he mean to us now, here in the U.S.? How have writers adapted his stories to suit different situations and different political and social agendas? In this course we will examine a range of Arthurian adaptations from Victorian era short stories to contemporary films. Our conversations and readings on this topic will serve as raw material for a sequence of assignments which includes three kinds of papers you will encounter throughout your college career: a close reading of a single text, the reading of a primary text through a theoretical lens, and a researched argument. The course will acquaint you with college-level expectations for writing and equip you with skills which are essential for success at Brandeis.