Smith College Spring 2018 English Courses
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Smith College Spring 2018 English Courses English 203 Western Classics: De Troyes to Tolstoy (200+ English elective) TuTh 10:30-11:15 Instructor: Maria Banerjee Same as CLT 203. Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain; Antony and Cleopatra; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Lafayette’s The Princesse of Clèves; Goethe’s Faust; Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Lecture and discussion. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 206 Intermediate Fiction Writing: Photography (200+ English elective)(creative writing spec.) Thurs 1:00-2:15 Instructor: Russell Rymer A writer’s workshop that focuses on sharpening and expanding each student’s fiction writing skills, as well as broadening and deepening her understanding of the short story form. Exercises will concentrate on using real-world interviewing and reporting to feed one's fictional work. Students will analyze and discuss each other's stories, and examine the work of established writers. Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required. Sample or samples should total approximately 1000 words, of any genre, and are due by the last day of registration. If the applicant has a writing project in mind for the semester, a description of it is also encouraged. This course uses concepts and methods of photography to advance students' fiction-writing abilities and comprehension. Students take photographs as a way of grappling with issues of focus, framing, depth of field, point of view, "flatness," timing, and other precepts of photography that are transferable to writing, and include their photographs in their fictional pieces. The point of the course is not to improve students' photo abilities (and no pre-req skills or special equipment are required), but to use photography to enhance writing skills and understanding. Final product is a publishable short story. Enrollment limit of 12.. Comments: Writing Sample Required. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during all registration periods. English 207 Technology of Reading and Writing (200+ English elective) MWF 9:00-9:50 Instructor: Douglas Patey Same as HSC 207. An introductory exploration of the physical forms that knowledge and communication have taken in the West, from ancient oral cultures to modern print-literate culture. Our main interest is in discovering how what is said and thought in a culture reflects its available kinds of literacy and media of communication. Topics to include poetry and memory in oral cultures; the invention of writing; the invention of prose; literature and science in a script culture; the coming of printing; changing concepts of publication, authorship and originality; movements toward standardization in language; the fundamentally transformative effects of electronic communication. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 208 Science Fiction? Speculative Fiction (200+ English elective) MWF 9:00-9:50 Instructor: William Oram This course offers a chance to read and think about works of science fiction and fantasy, considering the forms they take, the conventions they play with, and issues they address. We read novels and stories by H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Maureen McHugh, Ian McLeod, Ted Chiang, Andrea Hairston and others. Several films, including Pan's Labyrinth. Prerequisite: one college- level literature course or permission of the instructor. Recommended for nonmajors. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 211 Beowulf (British literature before 1700 or 200+ English elective) MWF 10:00-10:50 Instructor: Craig Davis A reading of Anglo-Saxon England’s most powerful and significant poem, invoking the world of barbarian Europe after the fall of Rome. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 229 Turning Novels Into Film (200+ English elective) TuTh 1:00-2:50 Instructor: Ambreen Hai "Not as good as the book,” is a frequent response to film adaptations of novels. Adaptation studies, an interdisciplinary field that combines literary and film studies, rejects this notion of “fidelity” (how faithful a film is to its source) and instead reads literature and film as equal but different artistic and cultural forms, where the film may translate, transmute, critique, or re-interpret the novel. This course will look closely and analytically at some paired fiction and film adaptations that focus on issues of imperialism, race, class, and gender. We’ll begin with some classics (Austen’s Mansfield Park, Forster’s Passage to India), move to international postcolonial fiction and film (Tagore’s Home and the World, Ondaatje’s English Patient), and end with U.S. texts about non-white, hyphenated citizens (Lahiri’s Namesake, Stockett’s The Help). We will also read some critical and theoretical essays to frame our key concepts. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 238 What Jane Austen Read (British literature after 1700 or 200+ English elective) MWF 11:00-12:10 Instructor: Douglas Patey A study of novels written in England from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen and Walter Scott (1688–1814). Emphasis on the novelists’ narrative models and choices; we conclude by reading several novels by Austen—including one she wrote when 13 years old. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 248 Literature of Blindness (200+ English elective) TuTh 10:30-11:50 Instructor: Andrew Leland The English language is dominated by visual metaphor: students, for example, must bring insight to their readings, inspecting these texts to look for—and illuminate—any blind spots. This course will examine Western culture’s privileging of vision that culture’s attitudes toward blindness, as well as the ways in which disability shapes and defines the way we read. Texts include works by blind authors (Helen Keller, JL Borges); sighted authors (from Sophocles to Saramago); literature made specifically for the blind (such as the first full-length “audiobooks,” recorded for blinded WWI veterans); and readings in philosophy, history, and disability studies. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 256 Shakespeare (British literature before 1700 or 200+ English elective) TuTh 10:30-11:50 Instructor: Naomi Miller Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, and Shakespeare's sonnets. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students. Not open to first-years. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 260 Milton (British literature before 1700 or 200+ English elective) MWF 11:00-12:10 Instructor: William Oram A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for regicide and advocate of human dignity, committed revolutionary and Renaissance humanist, and a poet of enormous creative power and influence, whose epic, Paradise Lost, changed subsequent English Literature. Not open to first-year students. Not open to first-years. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 264 Faulkner (American literature after 1865 or 200+ English elective) MW 1:10-2:30 Instructor: Michael Gorra The sustained explosion of Faulkner’s work in the dozen-odd years between The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses has no parallel in American literature. He explored the microtones of consciousness and conducted the most radical of experiments in narrative form. At the same time he relied more heavily on the spoken vernacular than anyone since Mark Twain, and he made his “little postage stamp of native soil” in northern Mississippi stand for the world itself. We read the great novels of his Yoknapatawpha cycle along with a selection of short stories, examining the linked and always problematic issues of race, region and remembrance in terms of the forms that he invented to deal with them. Not open to first-years. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 270 Race and the Graphic Novel (Anglophone/ethnic American or American literature after 1865 or 200+ English elective) MW 9:00-10:20 Instructor: Laura Fugikawa This course engages critical literary analysis through an examination of the construction and reimagining of race through graphic novels. Visual representations of race have long constructed the meaning of race, as well as been a critical tool for people assert new meanings. How have writers used this genre to explore their experiences of racialization and talk about social inequalities and racial difference? What knowledge, ideas and affects emerge from reading the medium of graphic novels, and what makes the form unique? We will employ close reading and analyze the relationship between written narrative and the visual image. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 277 Post-Colonial Women Writers (Anglophone or 200+ English elective) MW 1:10-2:30 Instructor: