University Bulletin (2009-2010)

COML 97a Senior Essay
Offers students an opportunity to produce a senior essay under the direction of an individual instructor. Usually offered every fall.
Staff

COML 98a Independent Study
May be taken only by majors, with the written permission of the advising head and the chair of the department.
Readings and reports under faculty supervision. Offered as needed.
Staff

COML 98b Independent Study
May be taken only by majors, with the written permission of the advising head and the chair of the department.
Reading and reports under faculty supervision. Offered as needed.
Staff

COML 99d Senior Thesis
May be taken only with the permission of the advising head.
This is a full-year course that must be taken by all senior majors in comparative literature who wish to undertake honors work. Usually offered every year.
Staff

COML 100a Comparing Literatures: Theory and Practice
[ hum wi ]
What is common and what is different in literatures of different cultures and times? How do literary ideas move from one culture to another? In this course students read theoretical texts, as well as literary works from around the world. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Powelstock

COML 102a Love in the Middle Ages
[ hum ]
A study of the conventions of courtly love and other forms of love, sacred and erotic, in medieval literature. Readings include Dante's Vita Nuova, Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Lansing

COML 103b Madness and Folly in Renaissance Literature
[ hum wi ]
A study of the theme of madness and folly as exemplified by the major writers of the Renaissance, including Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Cervantes. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Lansing

COML 104a Then and Now: Reimagining the Classics
[ hum oc ]
Participants read works from the Western canon that have so perplexed writers that some have rewritten the original text and produced a new work. Some characters simply haunt our imagination: Antigone, Dionysus, Faust, Hamlet. They defy authority or promise a dangerous liberation; they sell their soul to the devil or think so originally that they loosen our grip on reality. Students analyze the canonical text and then study the work as it has been reinterpreted at a later date in history. By listening to the dialogue that takes place across centuries, students will come to understand distinct cultural periods, including their own, more clearly.
Ms. Ratner (Romance Studies)

COML 108a Creating New Histories and Identities beyond the Nation: Transnational Female Voices in the U.S.
[ hum ]
Readings are in English.
An examination of literature (prose, poetry, memoirs) written by first- and second-generation immigrant women exploring the ways in which the experience of immigration shaped a new identity that simultaneously time incorporates and rejects national boundaries. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Reyes de Deu

COML 115b Fictions of Liberty: Europe in a Revolutionary Age
[ hum ]
The "Age of Enlightenment" fostered new notions of human rights that found their tumultuous proving ground in the French Revolution. Through writings from several genres and nations, this course explores some of the political, economic, religious, racial, and sexual "fictions of liberty" that have shaped our own time. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Lanser

COML 117a Magical Realism and Modern Myth
[ hum ]
An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from the United States, Latin American, and beyond. authors include Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Wings of Desire and Hero. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

COML 120b Dangerous Writers and Writers in Danger
[ hum ]
Examines the works of modern, twentieth-century writers from different areas of the world who have suffered exile, imprisonment, or death for their free thinking. Writers include: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Wole Soyinka, Gao Xinjan, Breyten Breytenbach, Reynoldo Arenas, and Salman Rushdie. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ratner

COML 122b Writing Home and Abroad: Literature by Women of Color
[ hum nw ]
Examines literature (prose, poetry, and memoirs) written by women of color across a wide spectrum of geographical and cultural sites. Literature written within the confines of the "home country" in the vernacular, as well as in English in immigrant locales, is read. The intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class as contained by the larger institutions of government, religion, nationalism, and sectarian politics are examined. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Singh

COML 123a Perfect Love?
[ hum ]
Analyzes how the desire to achieve a "perfect form of love," defined as one that denies the body in favor of a more spiritual attachment, can lead to illness and highly unhealthy behavior in literary texts and modern film. Filmmakers and authors studied include Wang-Kar Wai, Marguerite de Navarre, Boccaccio, Chrétien de Troyes, and Hawthorne. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

COML 130a Poetic Voices of Protest
[ hum ]
Poets are citizens, lovers, artists. Discusses major poems and prose by Whitman, Baudelaire, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and others celebrating American nationhood, and protesting world war, moral chaos, or Soviet dictatorship. Topics include myth, self-assertion, love and intimacy, decadence, ethics, despair and faith, a mother's voice. Students present a poetry slam. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

COML 135a Before the Law: Justice in Literature and Film
[ hum ]
Examines works of fiction and film as a means of addressing the problem of justice, highlighting by the same token the symbolic fabric of the law and the performative elements of legal institutions. We will focus on cultural expressions from Europe and Latin America that address the problem of the state and its subjects in a context of modernity broadly defined. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Rosenberg

COML 144b The Outsider as Artist and Lover
[ hum ]
Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Simone Weil exemplify the struggle to achieve meaning through literature, but they believed that art or God required them to renounce love and marriage. Buber's analysis of "dialogue" will clarify the interrelation of creativity, faith, and human intimacy in their short stories, prose poems, essays, and philosophical and autobiographical writings. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

COML 146b Classical East Asian Poetics
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to the classical poetic forms of China, Japan, and Korea. Special consideration is paid to issues of canonization, classical theories of literature, and the development of multilingual literary traditions. All readings are in English. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Fraleigh

COML 150b Critique of Erotic Reason
[ hum ]
May not be repeated for credit by students who took HUM 125a in spring 2008.
Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

COML 160a Contemporary East European Literature
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English.
Examines works of major East European (Polish, Czech, Russian, and other) authors in the historical context of late Communist and post-Communist experience. Special attention to reading for artistic qualities and engagement of historical and political problems. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

COML 163a Mediums and Messages
[ hum ]
How do human beings and human bodies participate in expressive communication technology, digital or otherwise? This course looks at examples of technological mediation in history, literature, art, science, and pseudo-science. Readings include works by Pynchon, Plato, Poe, Butler, Borges, Tiptree, Bioy-Casares, Kafka, and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Special one-time offering, fall 2009.
Ms. Swanstrom

COML 165a Reading, Writing, and Teaching across Cultures
[ hum wi ]
Contemporary literary representations of literacy, schooling, and language from a cross-cultural perspective. Students also analyze their own educational trajectories and experiences with writing and reading. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

COML 166b Literacy, Language and Culture
[ hum ]
Considers emergent literacy in cultures where different languages are spoken at home and school. Students will work directly on projects in Haiti and Lesotho designed to develop picture books for young children in their home languages. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

COML 179a Life Stories, Spiritual and Profane
[ hum ]
Examines modern life stories (such as biographies, autobiographies, journals, fiction) concerning personal identity in relation to the search for God, mysticism and anguish, conversion, moral action, and intimate love. Augustine's Confessions and Teresa of Avila's Life provide models for contemprary writers such as Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

COML 185a Dickens and Dostoevsky
[ hum ]
Considers such issues as narrative, literary realism, and the manipulation of the grotesque and the sublime in representative works of Dickens and Dostoevsky. Because Dostoevsky was an avid reader of Dickens, class addresses questions of influence, particularly with regard to their shared thematic interests. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

COML 190b Fictional Thinking
[ hum ]
"We can only think, in language, because language is and yet is not our voice," writes Slavoj Zizek. Studies how fictional characters in James, Proust, Woolf and others think before is and for us -- and each other. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

HUM 125a (Topics in the Humanities) may be considered as a cross-listed course, depending on the topic. Students should contact the undergraduate advising head before registering.

AAAS 125b Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work
[ ss wi ]
Utilizing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, fiction, and music to examine the relationship between women's sexuality and conceptions of labor, citizenship, and sovereignty. The course considers these alongside conceptions of masculinity, contending feminisms, and the global perspective. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 132b Introduction to African Literature
[ hum nw ss wi ]
Examines the cultural production of African writers and filmmakers and their critiques of the postcolonial state. Topics include their exploration of gender, sexuality, language choice, the pressures placed on "authentic" identities by diasporic communities, and the conflicting claims of tradition and modernity. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 133b The Literature of the Caribbean
[ hum nw ss wi ]
An exploration of the narrative strategies and themes of writers of the region who grapple with issues of colonialism, class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a context of often-conflicting allegiances to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ hum nw ]
Writers and filmmakers, who are usually examined separately under national or regional canonical categories such as "(North) American," "Latin American," "African," "British," or "Caribbean," are brought together here to examine transnational identities and investments in "authentic," "African," or "black" identities. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

CLAS 166a Medieval Literature: A Millennium of God, Sex, and Death
[ hum wi ]
A survey of medieval Latin literature in translation, beginning with the fourth-century church fathers and ending with the early Renaissance. Includes Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Egeria, Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Alcuin, Einhard, Hroswitha, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Hildegard, Anselm, and others. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Walker

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ hum wi ]
Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.
Mr. Dowden

ECS 100b European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Making of European Modernity
[ hum wi ]
Investigates how the paradigm of what we know as modernity came into being. We will look at the works of writers and philosophers such as Descartes, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Petrarch, Ficino, Rabelais, and Montaigne. Artwork from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will be used to understand better what "the modern" means. Usually offered every spring semester.
Mr. Randall

ENG 10a Canonical Precursors: Genesis, Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Virgil
[ hum ]
This course may not be repeated for credit by students who have taken HUM 10a in previous years.
Helps prepare majors for study of most premodern and even modern literature in English through readings of major texts central to a literary education for writers in English from the Middle Ages through modernism. Genesis, Iliad, Odyssey, Sappho's lyrics, Aeneid, Metamorphoses. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell or Mr. Flesch

ENG 37b Modern Drama
[ hum ]
An intensive study of British, U.S., and European drama of the last hundred years. Topics include new definitions of tragedy, changing sex/gender roles and the stage, the well-made play, the "angry" play, theater of the absurd. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Morrison

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum wi ]
How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 68a The Political Novel
[ hum wi ]
How do novels change and how are they changed by politics? From the satires of Eastern Europe (Kafka and Milan Kundera, Koestler's Darkness at Noon) to fiery American calls to action on racial issues (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man); from utopia to postcolonial disaster (Things Fall Apart). Film screenings included. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 107a Caribbean Women Writers
[ hum ]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ hum ]
Seminar in postcolonial theory with relevant background texts, with an emphasis on the specificity of its theoretical claims. Readings from Spivak, Said, Bhabha, Appiah, Mudimbe, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Derrida, Césaire, and Fanon, among others. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 114b Gender and the Rise of the Novel in England and France
[ hum ]
Explores the emergence of the novel as a modern genre in the eighteenth century, asking why the novel arises first in England and France, and what the new genre's preoccupations with women and gender can teach us about European society, culture, and literature. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Lanser

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ hum nw wi ]
Survey of the novel and short story of the Indian subcontinent, their formal experiments in context of nationalism and postcolonial history. Authors may include Tagore, Anand, Manto, Desani, Narayan, Desai, Devi, Rushdie, Roy, Mistry, and Chaudhuri. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ hum ]
Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

ENG 128a Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 11a.
British, European, and American works depicting alternate, often "better" worlds, including More's Utopia, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Voltaire's Candide, Casanova's Icosameron, selections from Charles Fourier, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis: Dawn, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 138a Making Modern Subjects: Caribbean/Latin America/U.S.A. 1850-1950
[ hum ]
Considers inflections of "the modern" across the Americas, allowing us to compare models and strategies at a historical moment when shifts from slavery to "freedom" and from Europe to the U.S.A., frame anxieties about empire, citizenship, technology, vernaculars, and aesthetics. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

ENG 140a Satire and Its Uses
[ hum ]
Examines the forms and methods of satirical fiction and poetry, with emphasis on writers from classical Greece and Rome, Britain, and the United States.
Staff

ENG 155a Literature and Empire
[ hum ]
Explores ideas about the local, regional, national, international, and cosmopolitan in Empire-era "Greater Britain." What role does literature play in the global movement of British and "colonized" culture? Includes Emily Eden, R. D. Blackmore, Hardy, Flora Steel, Conrad, Woolf, Waugh, and E. M. Forster. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 162a Totalitarian Fictions
[ hum ]
Investigates global dictator novels, with attention to formal issues surrounding the novel's ability to represent illiberal arrangements of power. Authors include Garcia Marquez, Achebe, and Junot Diaz. Films include "The Last King of Scotland" and Oliver Stone's "W". Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Anjaria

ENG 171a History of Literary Criticism
[ hum ]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Morrison or Ms. Quinney

ENG 197b Within the Veil: African-American and Muslim Women's Writing
[ hum ]
In twentieth-century United States culture, the veil has become a powerful metaphor, signifying initially the interior of African-American community and the lives of Muslims globally. This course investigates issues of identity, imperialism, cultural loyalty, and spirituality by looking at and linking contemporary writing by African-American and Muslim women. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman

FREN 110a Cultural Representations
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
A foundation course in French and Francophone culture, analyzing texts and other cultural phenomena such as film, painting, music, and politics. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FREN 137a The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Plague, War, and Human Power
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Compares literary responses written in French to humanitarian and political crises of the last century to those written in response to today's crises. Authors may include Boris Diop, Giraudoux, Camus, Beckett, Sebbar, Sartre, and Sijie Dai. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 155b French Drama of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
A study of plays corresponding to the following movements, era, and styles: Jarry's Ubu Roi revolutionized what could happen on stage, announcing the absurdist theater of such authors as Ionesco, Genet, and Beckett. Sartre, Camus, and Yourcenar wrote neoclassical plays in the same years. Francophone theater in the Caribbean, Quebec, and Africa (Schwarz-Bart, Farhoud, Mbia) borrowed from and adapted aesthetic principles from the French dramatists to dramatize colonial and postcolonial experiences. Students may choose to perform a play as a final class project. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 165b Francophone Literatures and Cultures of Subsaharan Africa
[ hum nw ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies writing in French in Subsaharan Africa, with particular emphasis upon its cultural and historical contexts. Topics include Negritude, African languages, defining "tradition,' oral and written literature, Islam, film, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Hale

HISP 111b Introduction to Latin American Literature
[ fl hum nw ]
Prerequisite: HISP 106b, or HISP 108a, or permission of the instructor.
The goal of this course is to recognize main trends of Latin American literary and cultural production. Examines canonical Latin American texts (poems, short stories, chronicles, and a novel) from the time of the conquest to modernity. Emphasis is placed on problems of cultural definition and identity construction as they are elaborated in literary discourse. Looks at continuities and ruptures in major themes (coloniality and emancipation, modernismo and modernity,
indigenismo, hybridity and mestizaje, nationalisms, Pan-Americanism,
etc.) throughout Latin American intellectual history. Usually offered every semester.
Mr. Rosenberg

HISP 160a Culture and Social Change in Latin America
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 111b.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, film, performance, and art. The cultural material to be examined addresses issues of justice and the rule of law, such as the organization of the nation-state, the rights of minorities, revolution, dictatorship and its aftermath, testimony and witnessing, and so on. Literature and the arts as agents of social change, and/or alternative tribunals where social justice is debated and adjudicated. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Rosenberg

HISP 164b Studies in Latin American Literature
[ fl hum nw ]
Course may be repeated for credit.
A comparative and critical study of main trends, ideas, and cultural formations in Latin America. Topics vary year to year and have included fiction and history in Latin American literature, nation and narration, Latin American autobiography, art and revolution in Latin America, and humor in Latin America. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Rosenberg

HISP 193b Topics in Cinema
[ hum wi ]
Course may be repeated for credit.
Topics vary from year to year, but might include consideration of a specific director, an outline of the history of a national cinema, a particular moment in film history, or Hollywood cinema in Spanish. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell or Mr. Rosenberg

HISP 195a Latinos in the United States: Perspectives from Literature, Film, and Performance
[ hum ]
Open to all students; conducted in English.
Comparative overview of Latino literature and film in the United States. Particular attention paid to how race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and concepts of "nation" become intertwined within texts. Topics include: explorations of language, autobiography and memory, and intertexuality. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Reyes

HUM 10a The Western Canon
[ hum ]
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year. Not offered 2008-2009.
Staff

HUM 125a Topics in the Humanities
[ hum ]
An interdisciplinary seminar on a topic of major significance in the humanities; the course content and instructor vary from year to year; may be repeated for credit, with instructor's permission. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

JAPN 130a The Literature of Multicultural Japan
[ hum nw ]
"Multicultural" may not be an adjective that many associate with Japan, but as we will find in this class, Japan's modern literary and cinematic tradition is rich with works by and about resident Koreans, Ainu, Okinawans, outcasts, and sexual and other marginalized minorities. Why then does the image of a monocultural Japan remain so resilient? Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Fraleigh

JAPN 135a Screening National Images: Japanese Film and Anime in Global Context
[ hum nw ]
All films and readings are in English.
An introduction to some major directors and works of postwar Japanese film and anime with special attention to such issues as genre, medium, adaptation, narrative, and the circulation of national images in the global setting. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Fraleigh

NEJS 175b Responses to the Holocaust in Literature
[ hum ]
The Holocaust has generated a rich and varied body of literary representations of this crucial event in modern history. This course studies significant examples of such representations, dwelling on their historical, cultural, and psychological aspects. The aesthetic and moral problems of representation are raised in each case. Authors examined include Wiesel, Levi, Appelfeld, Spiegelman, Celan, and Pagis. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

NEJS 177a The Holocaust in Jewish Literature
[ hum ]
A broad survey of Holocaust writings in Modern Hebrew literature. Examines the psychological, social, moral, and aesthetic challenges involved in representing the Holocaust in Israeli context through literary texts, theoretical research, works of art, and film. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Szobel

NEJS 179a Jewish Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: HBRW 40a, NEJS 10a, or equivalent.
An introduction to the Hebrew literature of Spain, Germany, and Italy during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Focus on Sephardic literature and on the continuities and discontinuities of Hebrew belles-lettres, giving attention to the impact of Arabic and European literature on Jewish authors. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Decter

NEJS 180a Love and Passion in Medieval Jewish Literature and Thought
[ hum ]
An exploration of the love theme in Jewish poetry, fiction, exegesis, and philosophical literature, from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Jewish texts from Palestine, Spain (Sefarad), France, and Italy are compared with texts in Arabic, Spanish, French, and Italian. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Decter

NEJS 181a Jews on Screen
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Survey course focusing on moving images of Jews and Jewish life in fiction and factual films. Includes early Russian and American silents, home movies of European Jews, Yiddish feature films, Israeli cinema, independent films, and Hollywood classics. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Rivo

NEJS 181b Film and the Holocaust
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Examines the medium of film, propaganda, documentary, and narrative fiction relevant to the history of the Holocaust. The use of film to shape, justify, document, interpret, and imagine the Holocaust. Beginning with the films produced by the Third Reich, the course includes films produced immediately after the events, as well as contemporary feature films. The focus will be how the film medium, as a medium, works to (re)present meaning(s). Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Rivo

SAS 101a South Asian Women Writers
[ hum nw ]
Includes literature by South Asian women writers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Some of the works were originally written in English, while others have been translated from the vernacular. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Singh

SAS 110b South Asian Postcolonial Writers
[ hum nw ]
Looks at the shared history of colonialism, specifically British imperialism, for many countries and examines the postcolonial novel written in English. Works read include those from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Singh

SAS 140a We Who Are at Home Everywhere: Narratives from the South Asian Diaspora
[ hum ]
Looks at narratives from various locations of the South Asian Diaspora, while paying close attention to the emergence of an immigrant South Asian public culture. Examines novels, poetry, short stories, film, and music in order to further an understanding of South Asian immigrant culture. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Singh

THA 33b Acting IV: Acting the Classics
[ ca ]
Prerequisite: THA 33a.
A continuation of THA 33a with work on more complex classical texts, including Shakespeare and the Greeks. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Morrison

THA 115b The Avant-Garde
[ ca hum ]
Explores the avant-garde movements including symbolism, decadence, futurism, constructivism, Dada, surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, pop art and happenings, performance art, minimalism, and postmodernism as alternative forms of expression that challenge mainstream art. Attention is paid to the interactions among theater, painting, dance, music, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg

THA 160a History of Theater Design: Classical Period to 1900
[ ca ]
Prerequisite: THA 2a or permission of the instructor.
A survey of scenic design: costume, theater spectacle, visual theater from the Renaissance to 1900. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Eigsti

THA 185b Dramatic Structure: Analysis and Application
[ ca ]
Students read works from the Greeks to the present, analyzing a variety of dramatic structures as a means of deriving meaning from plays. Texts include works by Aristotle, Aeschylus, Seneca, Hegel, Racine, Sarah Kane, Lope de Vega, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Pinter, Richard Greenberg, Caryl Churchill, Arthur Schnitzler, David Hare, Sergi Belbel, Joe Orton, and Kuan Han-ch'ing. Students will have the opportunity to write a play modeled after one of the structures studied in class. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. McKittrick