This course will explore the concept of wilderness in American culture. Americans have portrayed the less tamed region of the American landscape in a variety of ways: as a hostile space full of evil, as a rugged frontier that shapes individuals into Americans, and as a protected sanctuary for endangered species. In this class, we will focus on writings that explore the range of definitions and responses to the nation’s wild spaces. Students will explore these issues in class discussions about the texts and in writing assignments that analyze and critique the readings and our own definitions of what makes a place “wild.”
Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offeredStudents, as part of the work of the course, each week will tutor or lead discussions among a small group of students at Holyoke High School. The readings for the course will be essays, poems, autobiographies, and stories in which education and teaching figure centrally. Among these will be materials that focus directly on Holyoke and on one or another of the ethnic groups which have shaped its history. Students will write weekly and variously: critical essays, journal entries, ethnographies, etc. Readings for the course will include works by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, James Baldwin, Judith Ortiz Cofer, John Dewey, Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, Sarah Lightfoot, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Rodriguez, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia Williams. Two class meetings per week plus an additional workshop hour and a weekly morning teaching assistantship to be scheduled in Holyoke.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester: Professor Frank. Spring semester: Visiting Professor Cayer.
2023-24: Not offeredThis introduction to literary theory will offer an interrogation of some of the assumed tensions between experiences generally described as real and those described as imaginary. Over the course of the semester we will consider the ways literature enlarges personal experience, even as we will also attend to what happens when art approaches the limits of representation. Some of our particular concerns will include learning how to draw relationships between texts and their social and historical moments; questioning our own acts of learning about others through books; and exploring the relationship between identity and literacy. This class will also include a service component in which some of the class’ theory will come into practice, with students in this course working as reading partners to high school students engaged with the same texts and questions in American urban, rural, and reservation schools. Priority will be given to students already involved with teaching and literacy programs.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offeredLiving today in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed play scripts, newspaper and serial publication, broadsides and ballads, “little magazines,” radio, film, TV) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of emerging media. Texts may include Renaissance sonnet sequences, Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, selections from Johnson’s The Rambler, Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Dickens’The Pickwick Papers, Poe’s Selected Tales, Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Wilde’s Salomé, selections from Pound’s The Cantos, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Kushner’s Angels in America.
Preference given to sophomores. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Parker.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores the relation between literature and history. How does fiction work to interpret and understand the past? Can literary texts serve as historical evidence, providing information about social conditions and beliefs in a particular place and time? In what ways might other sorts of historical documentation affect or amplify the reading of literature? We will address these questions through specific examples and through theoretical readings that address issues of narration, memory, and the continuance of the past. The theme changes each time the course is taught. In 2010 we will focus on American literature and in particular on writing that confronts the social “problem” of the unmarried woman. Texts will include Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Harriet Jacobs’Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Mei Ng’s Eating Chinese Food Naked.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offeredHow do generic conventions affect a work’s production and interpretation? Reading a selection of plays written for the commercial Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theaters, we will try to answer this and other questions by considering the works in their historical and theatrical context, and by closely reading the plays themselves. Turning our attention to the tragedies, comedies, histories, and tragicomedies of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Ford, and Shirley, we will consider a range of topics, including genre, performance history, politics, religion, and gender.
Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offeredWhy does it seem natural to read ourselves and other people in the same way that we read books? This course will introduce students to both psychoanalytic theory and literary interpretation, asking about their similarities as well as their dissonance. Why do novels of development and case-studies resemble one another? What can the Freudian understanding of the structure of the psyche teach us about the structure of narrative? And what do “illnesses” like hysteria and paranoia have in common with everyday acts of meaning-making and with the way we read literature? Each week pairing a psychoanalytic paper with a short story or novel, we will ask how psychoanalysis alters not only what we see in literary works, but also the way we understand our own acts of interpretation. Topics include the unconscious, dreams, childhood, the uncanny, desire, subjects and objects, and mourning.
Reading will include essays by Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and others; and fiction by Jensen, Melville, Poe, Brontë, James, Flaubert, and Ishiguro.
Preference given to sophomores considering an English major. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Five College Fellow Christoff.
2023-24: Not offeredThe course will cover the years from 1820 to 1920. These are the years when Anglo-American literature achieved an international reputation. They are also the years of African Americans’ first intense and bitter struggle for liberation, and the years when the Euro-American conquest of the Indians was completed. The second half of the century also experienced the largest immigration in the history of the country until the post-1965 period, which enabled the United States to become the greatest industrial power in the world. The literature we will read is enmeshed in all these complex events: Cooper, Sedgwick, Emerson, Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.
Limited to 40 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor O'Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredA first course in the critical reading of selected major English, Irish, and American poets: Donne, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Yeats, and Bishop. Attention will be given to poetic forms and to the careers of the poets as well as to individual poems.
Spring semester. Professor Emeritus Townsend.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 13 and BLST 15 [A].) Against a backdrop that moves from Heart of Darkness to (PRODUCT)RED™, this semester we will focus on the current proliferation of “Africa” in the western imaginary. Such surges in interest about the continent are not new, and we will trace this literary and cultural phenomenon across the twentieth century, coming to settle mainly on contemporary American films. We will read our films as films, but also as cultural texts. We must wonder: Why these films now? Are there certain conditions under which the West turns to its imagination of Africa? And how might we account for the repetition of such turns over time? We will end the course in a consideration of cultural appropriation and what it means for expressive traditions. To get at this question, however, we will also look to some of the ways African filmmakers have responded to and have themselves appropriated elements of texts similar to those with which we began the semester.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 16 and FAMS 20.) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of a few critical and descriptive terms together with a selection of various films (historical and contemporary, foreign and American) for illustration and discussion. The terms for discussion will include, among others: the moving image, montage, mise en scène, sound, genre, authorship, the gaze.
Fall semester. Professor Cameron.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is concerned with the problem of honesty in subjective expression. We will study both fictional and non-fictional first person narratives. Some narrators deliberately deceive, and some deceive without intending to. How does an elusive understanding of the self make even an “honest” narrator’s project of telling harder, if not impossible? Readings will include works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Lauren Slater, and Geoff Dyer. Students will be required to produce both critical and creative writing. Creative writing experience preferred. Writing attentive.
Students are asked to bring a creative writing sample to the first class. For more information please consult the Creative Writing Center's Website: https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/english/cwc/writing-courses
Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Gaige.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to contemporary literary studies through the analysis of a variety of critical terms, a range of literary examples, and the relations between and among them. The terms considered in spring 2011 will be lyric, narrative, author, translation, and autobiography.
Preference given to sophomores. Spring semester. Professor Bosman.
2023-24: Not offeredA first workshop in the writing of poetry. Class members will read and discuss each others’ work and will study the elements of prosody: the line, stanza forms, meter, free verse, and more. Open to anyone interested in writing poetry and learning about the rudiments of craft. Writing exercises weekly. Limited enrollment. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course.
Limited enrollment. Fall semester. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 24 and FAMS 25.) This course is a first workshop in narrative screenwriting. Through frequent exercises, readings, and in-class screenings, we will analyze the fundamentals of scene and story shape as they’re practiced within the commercial world of filmmaking in the U.S. We’ll also take a broader look at what a “screenplay” might be outside of that world. In the process, we’ll examine both the well-established craft of cinematic storytelling (plot structure, character, conflict, action, dialogue, etc.), and the more elastic possibilities of the audio-visual medium itself. Previous film, theater, or writing courses are recommended but not required. Please consult the Creative Writing Center web site for information on admission to this course. One three-hour seminar per week.
Limited to 15 students. Preregistration is not allowed. Interested students should attend the first class. Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Johnson.
2023-24: Not offeredWe will study writers’ renderings of their own experiences (memoirs) and their analyses of society and its institutions (cultural criticism). Workshop format, with discussion of texts and of students’ experiments in the genre. Students must submit examples of their writing to the English office. Three class hours per week.
Limited enrollment. Spring semester. Professor Emeritus Townsend.
2023-24: Not offeredA first course in writing fiction. Emphasis will be on experimentation as well as on developing skill and craft. Workshop (discussion) format.
Limited enrollment. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course. Fall semester: Visiting Writer Gaige. Spring semester: Professor Frank.
2023-24: Not offeredA second, advanced workshop for practicing poets. Students will undertake a longer project as well as doing exercises every week exploring technical problems.
Requisite: English 21 or the equivalent. Limited enrollment. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course. Spring semester. Writer-in-Residence Hall and Simpson Lecturer Wilbur.
2023-24: Not offeredAn advanced level fiction class. Students will undertake a longer project as well as doing exercises every week exploring technical problems.
Requisite: Completion of a previous course in creative writing. Limited enrollment. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Gaige.
2023-24: Not offeredA poetry writing course, but with a strong emphasis on reading. Students will closely examine the work of various poets and periods, then attempt to write plausible imitations of their own, all by way of learning about poetry from the inside, as it were.
Omitted 2010-11. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
2023-24: Not offeredThe course aims to give the student rapid mastery of Chaucer’s English and an active appreciation of his dramatic and narrative poetry. No prior knowledge of Middle English is expected. A knowledge of Modern English grammar and its nomenclature, or a similar knowledge of another language, will be helpful. Short critical papers and frequent declamation in class. The emphasis will be on Chaucer’s humor, irony and lyricism. We will read The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and some shorter poems. Three class hours per week.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Chickering.
2023-24: Not offeredThe course aims to give the student rapid mastery of Chaucer’s English and an active appreciation of his poetry. No prior knowledge of Middle English is expected. A knowledge of Modern English grammar and its nomenclature, or a similar knowledge of another language, will be helpful. Short critical papers and frequent declamation in class. The emphasis will be on Chaucer’s humor, irony, and his narrative and dramatic gifts. We will read all of the poetic Tales and excerpts from the two prose Tales. Three class hours per week.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Chickering.
2023-24: Not offeredA study of Chaucer’s “dream visions” and short lyric poems, which explore topics as diverse as love, death, fame, and politics. This course will introduce students to Chaucer’s poetic style and themes, and to the medieval culture in which he lived. All texts will be read in Middle English (of which no prior knowledge is required).
Fall semester. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offeredThe course surveys multiple forms of drama and spectacle in Renaissance England with special attention to the cultural articulation of space. We will consider the relation of a range of texts to their real and imagined performance sites-public theatres like the Globe as well as private playhouses, castles, fairgrounds, taverns, and the streets of London-asking what impact these places had on the dramas themselves, on their representation of public and private worlds, and on the social and political role of theatre in society at large. Reading will include works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Middleton and Rowley, and Milton.
Requisite: Recommend a previous course in Shakespeare or Renaissance literature. Spring semester. Professor Bosman.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings in comedies, histories, and tragedies, considering the plays both as texts to be read and as events in the theater, with some attention to film versions. Films will be available on streaming video and on Library reserve. Two class meetings per week.
Limited to 50 students. Fall semester. Professor Berek (Mount Holyoke College).
Readings in the poetry and prose of six classic figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Ben Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Samuel Johnson. Attention given to other writers from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Three class hours per week.
Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Fall semester. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings in the poetry and prose of six classic figures from the nineteenth century: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold. Some attention given to Coleridge, Shelley, Browning.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredA selection of mid-nineteenth-century English novels approached from various critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives. In spring 2009 the course will focus on novels written around 1848, among them Disraeli’s Sybil, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, E. Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Trollope’s Barchester Towers, and Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Parker.
2023-24: Not offeredThe novels read include ones by nineteenth-century English and American writers: Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, as well as ones more recent and less well-known. E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and James Wood’s How Fiction Works will be used as critical handbooks that address themselves to questions of narrative procedures and literary value. Papers are directed at improving the student’s resourcefulness as a reader and critic of fiction.
Spring semester. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings in twentieth-century writers such as Henry James, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, George Orwell, Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Not open to first-year students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings and discussions centering on the work of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Some attention also to A.E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
Not open to first-year students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings and discussion. The syllabus will include poets from the English-speaking world: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Wilbur, Larkin, Hecht, Merrill, Hill, Clampitt, Walcott, Heaney, and others. The course will conclude with a substantial paper on a book published in 2008 or 2009. Two class meetings per week.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Sofield.
2023-24: Not offeredExploring the relations between literary form and socioeconomic change, this course examines the rise of the novel in England in the context of the rise of capitalism. Topics of discussion will include the novels’ portrayals of subjectivity, the representation of female experience, the role of servants in the imaginary worlds of novels by ruling-class authors, and the early novel’s affinity for and relation to criminality. Novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney and Edgeworth.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Frank.
2023-24: Not offeredThe moral essay is a genre situated somewhere between literature and philosophy, between stories and sermons. “The essay interests itself in the narration of ideas,” one critic writes, “in their unfolding.” The moral essay is not about morals per se but about manners, about the way people live-and die. We will read essays by Montaigne, Bacon, Emerson, and Simone Weil.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Emeritus Townsend.
2023-24: Not offeredOrganizing and expressing one’s intellectual and social experience. Twice weekly writing assignments: a sketch or short essay of self-definition in relation to others, using language in a particular way-for example, as spectator of, witness to, or participant in, a situation. These short essays serve as preparation for a final, more extended, autobiographical essay assessing the student’s own intellectual growth.
Limited to 20 students. Open to juniors and seniors. Fall semester. Senior Lecturer von Schmidt.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 52 and BLST 37 [CLA].) A survey of the work of Anglophone Caribbean poets, alongside readings about the political, cultural and aesthetic traditions that have influenced their work. Readings will include longer cycles of poems by Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite; dialect and neoclassical poetry from the colonial period, as well as more recent poetry by women writers and performance (“dub”) poets.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Cobham-Sander.
2023-24: Not offeredA specialized study of a peculiar kind of literary experiment-the attempt to create, in verse or prose, the sustained illusion of insane utterance. Readings will include soliloquies, dramatic monologues and extended “confessional” narratives by classic and contemporary authors, from Shakespeare and Browning, Poe and Dostoevsky to writers like Nabokov, Beckett, or Sylvia Plath. We shall seek to understand the various impulses and special effects which might lead an author to adopt an “abnormal” voice and to experiment with a “mad monologue.” The class will occasionally consult clinical and cultural hypotheses which seek to account for the behaviors enacted in certain literary texts. Three class hours per week.
Requisite: Several previous courses in literature and/or psychology. Open to juniors and seniors and to sophomores with consent of the instructor. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Peterson.
2023-24: Not offered“The Linguistic Turn” is a first course in literary and cultural theory. Though it will devote some early attention to the principles and methods of linguistic analysis, this class is not conceived as an introduction to linguistics per se. We will be asking, instead, much broader questions about the nature of “language,” among them whether there is such a thing, and, if so, why it has come to define for us the nature of our contemporaneity.
Open to juniors and seniors. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Parker.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 55 and BLST 29 [A/CLA].) The course will concentrate on Caribbean authors. It explores the process of self-definition in literary works from Africa and the Caribbean that are built around child protagonists. We will examine the authors’ various methods of ordering experience through the choice of literary form and narrative technique, as well as the child/author’s perception of his or her society. French texts will be read in translation.
Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Cobham-Sander.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will focus on the major poets and schools of American poetry from 1900 to 1990, placing equal weight on each school’s agenda. Inevitably, though, we will confront two related questions: how does one form and represent aesthetic judgment and what is the social basis for evaluations of taste. These questions will become evident as we analyze the often fractious (but also nourishing) dynamics of formation and counter-formation which govern the development of distinct schools and trends in poetry. Along the way we will try to unsettle a few cherished orthodoxies while contextualizing formal concerns within historical frameworks. Why, for instance, does Imagism emerge when it does and what drives its rejection of the past? How does the Cold War inflect the mid-century work of poets as distinct as Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Olson? Is there really such a deep divide between Allen Ginsberg, on the one hand, and Anne Sexton, on the other? Two class meetings per week.
Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Pritchett.
2023-24: Not offeredAlthough little studied as a separate literary form, the book of interlinked short stories is a prominent form of modern fiction. This course will examine a variety of these compositions in an attempt to understand how they achieve their coherence and what kinds of “larger story” they tell through the unfolding sequence of separate narratives. Works likely to be considered include Hemingway’s In Our Time, Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. The course concludes with a significant independent project on a chosen modern (or contemporary) example of the form and its relation to preceding works.
Limited to 15 students. Preference given to junior and senior English majors. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Peterson.
The period 1880 to 1920 appears to have been the moment of the emergence of modern sexuality in American and European culture and literature. The representation of proliferating forms of erotic desire, often veiled or coded, found rich and complex articulation in the discourse of literary modernism. The course will take advantage of recent historical and theoretical work (Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler and others) to approach writing by Melville, Cather, Henry James, R.L. Stevenson, Wilde, Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Gide, Mann, Colette, and others. Attention will be paid to the work of Sigmund Freud in this period as being perhaps the queerest fiction of all.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Cameron.
2023-24: Not offeredA study of American and British gay and lesbian novelists, from 1990 to the present, who have written historical novels. We will examine such topics as the kinds of expressive and ideological possibilities the historical novel offers gay and lesbian novelists, the representation of sexuality in narratives that take place before Stonewall, and the way these authors position queer lives in history. Novelists include Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue, Jeanette Winterson, Leslie Feinberg, Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Tóibín, and Michael Cunningham.
Spring semester. Professor Frank.
2023-24: Not offeredThe topic varies from year to year. In fall 2008 the topic was “Twentieth-Century American Indian Literature.” Before the twentieth century American Indian writing took the form of sermons, political statements, journalism, or a few remarkable autobiographies. But there was little in the way of poetry, short stories, or novels. Especially since the 1960s Indian writing has enjoyed what has been called a “renaissance,” and there are a number of Indian writers who stand among the first ranks of American writers. We will attempt as comprehensive a survey as possible of the major American Indian writers since 1960 across all genres, writers such as Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, and Sherman Alexie. In addition the course will begin with a brief look at Indian writers of the first half of the twentieth century: Charles Eastman, John J. Mathews, and Darcy McNickle.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor O'Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will regularly examine, from different historical and theoretical stances, the literary and cultural scene in nineteenth-century America. The goal of the course is to formulate new questions and possibilities for investigating the history and literature of the United States. The topic changes each time the course is taught.
The topic for spring 2010 was EMILY DICKINSON. “Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By–Paradox–the Mind itself–” she explained in one poem and in this course we will make use of the resources of the town of Amherst to play experience and mind off each other in our efforts to come to terms with her elusive poetry. The course will meet in the Dickinson Homestead, visit the Evergreens (her brother Austen’s house, and a veritable time capsule), make use of Dickinson manuscripts in the College archives, and set her work in the context of other nineteenth-century writers including Helen Hunt Jackson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Jacobs. But as we explore how Dickinson’s poetry responds to her world we will also ask how it can speak to our present. One major project of the course will be to develop exhibits and activities for the Homestead that will help visitors engage with her poems. One class meeting per week.
Recommended requisite: English 61. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offeredOver the course of the semester, we will examine the construction of Asian American identity from the late 1800s to the present day. We will explore, in particular, how Asians in America have been represented and defined in the realms of law and literature, how these separate realms have intersected and informed one another. We will not only explore the formation of Asian American identity from the outside, but also from within this broad racial category, as reflected in works by Asian American authors and documentary filmmakers. The course will be strongly interdisciplinary and include readings in history, ethnic studies, legal studies, material culture, and literary criticism.
Limited to 30 students. Fall semester. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offeredA study of the emergence after the Civil War of works and theories of literary “realism” and of the movement’s transformation into “naturalistic” novels and experimental “modernist” fictions of the early twentieth century. The course concludes with a brief look at a contemporary “postmodern” text. Special attention will be given to changing conceptions and renderings of racial, cultural, and sexual differences. Among the authors likely to be assigned are Howells, James, Twain, Dreiser, Norris, Chopin, Wright, Larsen, Hemingway, Toomer, Faulkner, and DeLillo. Three class hours per week.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Peterson.
2023-24: Not offeredEthnicity. What is it? What does it mean to be Irish American? African American? Jewish American? How does one experience being any one of these? What does literature by “ethnic” authors tell us about identity in America and how ethnicity, in particular, shapes how we tell stories? Moreover, what about the other side of that hyphenated identity–American? What does that mean in an increasingly diverse nation? These are some of the questions that will guide us during the semester as we read and discuss samples of American ethnic literature: poetry, oratory, prose, and memoir.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 66 and BLST 39 [US].) The topic changes each time the course is taught. In spring 2011 the topic will be “The Weary Blues: Mourning in African American Literature and Culture.” As a population generally familiar with the facts of living too hard and dying too soon, how have African Americans used their literary and cultural traditions to memorialize-to articulate and often to work through conditions of pain and loss? Using a variety of literary and cultural texts, including RIP murals, poetry, and music, this semester’s topic examines the various ways African Americans express and aestheticize loss; how mourning often works as a foundation for militancy; and, most importantly, how loss is often recuperated through ideologies of art, love, and memory.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offeredThe focus of the course will be on education within the United States. From the earliest days of the new republic Americans have linked the prospects of democracy with the quality and extent of educational opportunity. Two fundamental and contradictory questions, however, have shaped nearly every controversy: (1) Should education be a competitive system to establish and legitimate a hierarchy of merit? or (2) Should schools focus on the fullest development of each student so as to enable her or him to participate equally in a democratic society by contributing from her or his individual gifts and differences? Finally, another key and virtually silent assumption has shaped these debates: that schools are the primary generators of equality or inequality. One might argue that this assumption has functioned to help Americans evade greater and more substantial sources of inequality such as the corporate order, housing, access to medical care, and many others. The course will not seek to resolve these questions, but to explore how the different assumptions involved structure what can be taught and learned and by whom. The texts for the course will range across a number of disciplines: philosophy, cognitive psychology, literature, sociology, and political science and theory. John Dewey’s Democracy and Education will be the framing text. Two class meetings per week.
Requisite: English 02 or an equivalent course. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor O'Connell.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 69, BLST 17 [US], and FAMS 57.) Is identity natural or cultural? This question has persisted through centuries of American writing, and many of the most interesting meditations on this question arise from books and films that deal with passing. Texts about passing, about people who can successfully pass themselves off as something different from what they were “born as,” form an important subgenre of American culture because they force us to question some strangely consistent inconsistencies in how we define identity. If race, for example, signifies a real and material difference, how could there be such a thing as racial passing? But, at the same time, if race is “only” a social construction, then why is racial passing so often characterized as a crime against nature? Stories about passing often illustrate a fundamental ambivalence on the personal meaningfulness of biopower in America, and also reveal the nascent virtuality of worldly experiences more generally. That in mind, this course explores a broad range of literary and cultural texts, including novels by Charles Chesnutt, Percival Everett, and Danzy Senna, and film and televisual texts like Gattaca, Avatar, Sirk’s Imitation of Life, and Eddie Murphy’s “White Like Me.”
Not open to first-year students. Limited to 30 students. Fall semester. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offeredNovels and short fiction, mainly comic, by such writers as Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, John Updike, Philip Roth, Nicholson Baker, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Barbara Pym, Robert Stone, Richard Ford. The emphasis will be on developing students’ ability to write useful criticism about the work and the writer in question.
Omitted 2010-11. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course has as its first goal the rapid mastery of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) as a language for reading knowledge. Selected prose and short poems, such as The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon, will be read in the original, with emphasis on literary appreciation as well as linguistic analysis. After that, our objectives will be an appreciation of Beowulf in the original, through the use of the instructor’s dual-language edition, and an understanding of the major issues in interpreting the poem. Students will declaim verses and write short critical papers. Three class hours per week.
Spring semester. Professor Chickering.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 79 and WAGS 79.) Why feminism? Isn’t feminism outmoded and passé? What is feminism today, and how is it relevant for theater and performance work? This class will explore the relationship between feminist history, theory, and practice. It will serve as an introduction to the work of twentieth-century women playwrights, performance artists, and critical thinkers. We will first confront feminism as a tool for reading and interpreting issues of gender and sexuality in plays and performances. We will also consider how, and to what extent, feminism influences practices of writing, performing, and spectatorship. We will then mobilize a global and inclusive definition of feminism in order to explore how the social and political aims of early feminisms influenced thinking about racial, national, post-colonial, queer, and ethnic representation in performance. Central debates will include the distinctions and shifts between theater and performance; textuality and embodiment; essentialism and social construction; and identity and representation. Course materials will include plays, performances, and visual art as well as feminist theoretical texts. We will aim to understand the diverse political and personal ambitions, risks, and power of women’s theoretical, theatrical, and performance work.
Spring semester. Visiting Professor Cayer.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 82 and FAMS 40.) The topic changes each time the course is taught. In spring 2011 the topic will be “Narrative Cinema in a Global Context.” This course will introduce students to a diverse range of approaches to narrative filmmaking. Students will gain skills in videomaking and criticism through project assignments, readings and analysis of critical discourses that ground issues of production. The course will include workshops in cinematography, sound recording, lighting and editing. Screenings will include works by Jia Zhangke, Claire Denis, Charles Burnett, and Lucrecia Martel. Students will complete three video projects.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Please complete the questionnaire at https://cms.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/english/events/questionnaire. Spring semester. Five College Professor Hillman.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study of a range of non-fiction films, including (but not limited to) the “documentary,” ethnographic film, autobiographical film, the film essay. Will include the work of Eisenstein, Vertov, Ivens, Franju, Ophüls, Leacock, Kopple, Gardner, Herzog, Chopra, Citron, Wiseman, Blank, Apted, Marker, Morris, Joslin, Riggs, McElwee. Two film programs weekly. Readings will focus on issues of representation, of “truth” in documentary, and the ethical issues raised by the films.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2010-11. Senior Lecturer von Schmidt.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 84 and FAMS 50.) The topic changes each time the course is taught. In fall 2010 the topic will be “Knowing Television.” For better or worse, U.S. broadcast television is a cultural form that is not commonly associated with knowledge. This course will take what might seem a radical counter-position to such assumptions--looking at the ways television teaches us what it is and even trains us in potential critical practices for investigating it. By considering its formal structure, its textual definitions, and the means through which we see it, we will map out how it is that we come to know television.
Prior coursework in Film and Media Studies is recommended, but not required. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 30 students. Fall semester. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offeredA critical reading in English translation of substantial portions of Marcel Proust’s great work of fiction and philosophy, A la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). An extended synopsis of the entire work will be provided. Class discussion and exercises will concentrate on major passages of the work (amounting to roughly half of the whole). Attention will be given to the tradition of critical commentary in English on Proust’s work and its place as a document of European modernism. Two class meetings per week.
Requisite: Recommend prior study in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century English or French novel. Not recommended for first-year students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Cameron.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and some portions of Finnegans Wake. Two class meetings per week.
Not open to first-year students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Cameron.
2023-24: Not offeredStudents intending to continue independent work begun in English 87 are required to submit, by the end of the first week of classes, a five-page prospectus describing in detail the shape of the intended project along with a substantial writing sample from the work completed in English 87. Students beginning a new project who wish to apply for English 88 must submit, by the end of the first week of classes, a five-page description and rationale for the proposed independent study. Those who propose projects in fiction, verse, playwriting, or autobiography must submit a substantial sample of work in the appropriate mode; students wishing to undertake critical projects must include a tentative bibliography with their proposal. Preregistration is not allowed.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring semester.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 89 and THDA 96.) This course will focus on creating a performance, music, and video piece on the themes of migration, displacement, memory and history. The piece will be developed through interdisciplinary experiments that emphasize the exploration of reciprocal relationships within and between the different media. Students will work individually and in collaborative teams and will be involved in the conception, rehearsals and performances of an original performance work directed by the professors. One three-hour class meeting per week plus a lab session.
This course is for intermediate/advanced performers, videomakers, composers, and designers who have previous experience in any of the above media. Requisite: Previous experience in composition in video, theater, music, creative writing, and/or dance. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 16 students. Omitted 2010-11. Five College Professor Hillman and Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredWe’ll be reading the letters, stories, and essays of writers who are much better known for their poetry, beginning with Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries, Specimen Days. Other writers will include Hart Crane (letters), Elizabeth Bishop (fiction), and Li-Young Lee and James Merrill (memoirs). Three class meetings per week.
Spring semester. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings of poets who have chosen to live in a culture other than their own, with an emphasis on T.S. Eliot in London, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, Thom Gunn in California, and Agha Shahid Ali in New England. Two class meetings per week.
Omitted 2010-11. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
2023-24: Not offeredThe story of American writers, artists, and musicians who lived and worked in Paris can be imagined as a drama in two acts. Act I, set in the 1920s, brings Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein to center stage. Act II, set in the postwar years, belongs mainly to African American writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Although the spotlight is mainly on the writers, there are important roles for painters (Gerald Murphy), photographers (Man Ray), dancers (Josephine Baker), and musicians (Sidney Bechet). There is also a kind of epilogue in which the French present their view of the Americans in their midst. Foremost among the questions to be asked is this: how did their experience as “exiles abroad” alter and complicate these Americans’ sense of their national, racial, sexual, and professional identities? Two class meetings per week.
Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Guttmann.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent Reading Courses.
Spring semester. The Department.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to movement as a language and to dance and performance composition. In studio sessions students will explore and expand their individual movement vocabularies by working improvisationally with weight, posture, gesture, patterns, rhythm, space, and relationship of body parts. We will ask what these vocabularies might communicate about emotion, thought, physical structures, cultural/social traditions, and aesthetic preferences. In addition, we will observe movement practices in everyday situations and in formal performance events and use these observations as inspiration for individual and group compositions. Two two-hour class/studio meetings and a two-hour production workshop per week. Selected readings and viewing of video and live performance.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to design, directing, and performance conducted in a combined discussion/workshop format. Students will be exposed to visual methods of interpreting a text. Early class discussions focus on a theoretical exploration of theater as an art form and seek to establish a vocabulary for and understanding of basic theatrical conventions, with readings from Aristotle through Robert Wilson. Students will spend the bulk of the semester testing these theories for themselves, ultimately designing their own performances for two plays. Two two-hour classes and two-hour production workshop included in this time.
Two sections. Limited to 12 students per section. Spring semester. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course examines what happens on stage (the action) and “how” that action happens (the character) from the points of view of the playwright and the actor. The course assumes that the creative processes of both the actor and the playwright are similar. Therefore, the students will write scenes and at least one short play, which will be rehearsed as homework for presentation in class. Students will be given a series of acting and playwriting exercises to develop craft and to reinforce their understanding of creative processes. Students will be assigned plays and certain critical texts to support their work in writing and acting. Three two-hour class meetings and a two-hour production workshop per week.
Enrollment in each section is limited but early registration does not confer preferential consideration. Twenty students attending the first class will be admitted. Selection will be based upon the instructor’s attempt to achieve a suitable balance between first-year students and upperclassmen and between men and women, and to achieve a broad range of levels of acting experience. Notice of those admitted will be posted within 24 hours of the first meeting and a waiting list will be available.
Fall and spring semesters. Resident Artist Lobdell.
2023-24: Not offeredThe status quo says, “We do it the way it’s always been done.” The artist replies, “I have an idea, let’s try it another way.” Thus advance theater and dance. Thus evolve opera, happenings and performance art. This course explores several seminal theatrical events and the artists who created them. These innovations changed the course of theater and dance in the 20th century, thereby preparing those who follow to make the new art of the 21st.
After reviewing basic artistic and theoretical assumptions which governed the making of theatrical entertainment at the end of the 19th century, the course will look at playwrights, performers, choreographers, designers, directors and theorists whose ideas opened up new ways of looking at the craft of making those space-time objects we struggle to categorize as plays, dances, operas, performances and events. Particular attention will fall on work that is difficult to correctly place in a single category. Research in primary material such as plays, manifestos, documentary photographs, period criticism, and video transcriptions. Critical papers comparing and contrasting works will be studied. (Required of all majors)
Spring semester. Senior Resident Artist Lobdell.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course considers the evolution of conventions of theatrical realism in plays since the late nineteenth century. In particular, we consider the ways that playwrights—and later directors—exploit or challenge ideas about the perceived authenticity of theatrical representation. At issue are conventions governing action, character representation, and theatrical image as the bases for thematic, political and cultural intents. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the roles that audiences are intended to play in performance and the artistic means employed to engage them. Following consideration of Ibsen and Chekhov, the work of relevant realistic and quasi-realistic playwrights from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries provides material for exploration of the course theme. We also explore the interplay of related artistic movements and technology with the evolution of theatrical conventions and directorial influence.
Spring semester. Professor Bashford.
2023-24: Not offeredA study of European and American drama from Ibsen to Pinter from a dramaturgical point of view. Through reading and discussing a wide variety of important plays, students will develop skills in textual analysis and explore productive ways of interpreting the theatrical script. Academic work will include critical papers and in-class experimentation with performance ideas. Particularly useful to augment the study of acting, directing, design and playwrighting.
Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offeredThis selected survey of choreography on film and video indulges in the purely kinesthetic experience of watching the dancing body on film. We will focus on works that have most successfully effected a true synthesis of the two mediums, negotiating between the spatial freedom of film and the time-space-energy fields of dance, the cinematic techniques of camera-cutting-collage, and the vibrant continuity of the moving body. We will discern the roles of the choreographer, director, and editor in shaping and controlling the moving image and explore the relationship of music and the dancing body. We will also attempt to theorize the medium of the “moving picture dance” and formulate a theoretical understanding of the relationship between films and viewers and the powerful effect of the moving/dancing image on viewers. Putting theory to practice, we will form small group collaborations to create an original study in choreography for the camera.
Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offeredCool, candid, athletic; playful, arrogant, and promiscuous: Sixties experimental dance works were wildly divergent but can collectively be seen as a revolt against the institution of American modern dance as they offered bold alternatives as to who was a dancer, what made a dance, what was “beautiful” and worth watching, and what was “art.” Mirroring the decade that was marked by tumultuous social and political change and guided by the decade’s liberating ideal, sixties vanguard dancers often outrageously (and naively) invalidated modern dance’s authority by “going beyond democracy into anarchy.” Jill Johnston wrote about the rebels of the Judson Dance Theatre, "No member outstanding. No body necessarily more beautiful than any other body. No movement necessarily more important or more beautiful than any other movement.”
This survey of twentieth-century American dance moves from the sixties—a decade of revolt and redefinition in American modern dance that provoked new ideas about dance, the dancer’s body and a radically changed dance aesthetic--to the radical postmodernism of the nineties when the body continued to be the site for debates about the nature of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. We will investigate how the political and social environment of the sixties, particularly the Black Power and Women’s Movement, informed the work of succeeding generations of dance artists and yielded new theories about the relationship between cultural forms and the construction of identities.
Fall semester. Five College Dance Professor Valis Hill.
2023-24: Not offered
The 1930s and the 1960s were periods of social disorder in much of America. They were also times of extraordinary theatrical activity. This course looks at Dramatic Literature and the work of theater companies in America in those turbulent decades and considers to what extent the theater today reflects the nation's present social and economic turmoil. Readings from each period in Dramatic Literature and Cultural History. The course will consider the plays in a seminar format and will require several short research papers and occasional theatrical projects.
Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores various elements of dramatic literature and their implications for audience experiences in performance. Character, language, spectacle, plotting and theme are studied in the light of dynamic play structures. In addition to analytical writing, students undertake experiential projects in realizing the underlying theatrical and narrative paradigms of the plays studied. Exemplary plays are chosen for their contrasting qualities, from antiquity to the present, and are read alongside related theoretical and critical texts. Particular emphasis is placed on exploring the legacy of classical form and later evolutionary and innovative responses to it. Playwrights considered include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, Kaufman and Hart, Peter Weiss, and Caryl Churchill.
Fall semester. Professor Bashford.
2023-24: Not offeredContemporary Dance Techniques: Modern 4/5
The study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit. Objectives include the intellectual and physical introduction to this discipline as well as increased body awareness, alignment, flexibility, coordination, strength, musical phrasing and the expressive potential of movement. The course material is presented at the beginning/intermediate level.
Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Martin.
2023-24: Not offeredA workshop in writing for the stage. The semester will begin with exercises that lead to the making of short plays and, by the end of the term, longer plays-ten minutes and up in length. Writing will be done in and out of class; students’ work will be discussed in the workshop and in private conferences. At the end of the term, the student will submit a portfolio of revisions of all the exercises, including the revisions of all plays.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Not open to first-year students. Spring semester. Playwright-in-Residence Congdon.
2023-24: Not offeredA beginning studio course in the development of voice for speaking. Students develop range and tone through regular physical exercises in relaxation, breathing technique, placement, and presence. Individual attention focuses on helping each student develop the the physical, mental, and emotional self-awareness needed for expressive vocal production. Practice is oriented toward acting for the stage, but students with a primary interest in public speaking, teaching, or improved interpersonal communication will find this course valuable. Three class meetings per week. A modicum of reading and written reflection is required.
Fall semester. Professor Bashford
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will include studio sessions in contemporary modern/jazz dance technique at the intermediate level and rehearsal sessions to create original choreography; the completed piece(s) will be presented in concert at the end of the semester. The emphasis in the course will be to increase expressive range, technical skills and performance versatility of the dancer through the practice, creation and performance of technique and choreography. In addition, the course will include required readings, the viewing of dance videos and live performances to give an increased understanding of the historical and contemporary context for the work. Audition for course enrollment will be held the first day of class.
Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Martin.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will provide structures and approaches for creating original choreography, performance pieces and events. An emphasis will be placed on interdisciplinary and experimental approaches to composition, choreography, and performance making. These approaches include working with text and movement, visual systems and environments, music, sound and chance scores to inspire and include in performance. Students will create and perform dance, theater, or performance art pieces for both traditional theater spaces and for found (indoor and outdoor) spaces.
This course is open to dancers and actors as well as interested students from other media and disciplines. Two two-hour class meetings per week and weekly lab/rehearsal sessions.
Consent of the instructor is required for students with no experience in improvisation or composition. Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offeredTechnical issues of the body, voice, will, and imagination for the actor; exercises and readings in acting theory. Introduction of techniques to foster physical and emotional concentration, will and imaginative freedom. Exploration of Chekhov psycho-physical work, Hagen object exercises, Spolin and Johnstone improvisation formats, sensory and image work, mask and costume exercises, and neutral dialogues. The complex interweaving of the actor’s and the character’s intention/action in rehearsal and performance is the constant focus of the class. Three two-hour class meetings per week.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 13. Omitted 2010-11. Resident Artist Lobdell.
2023-24: Not offeredStudents in this class will rehearse scenes directed by students enrolled in Theater and Dance 45. In addition, students will meet with the instructor weekly for specific exercises based upon problems confronted in rehearsal.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 13. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2010-11. Resident Artist Lobdell.
2023-24: Not offeredThe materials, techniques and concepts which underlie the design and creation of the theatrical environment.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 12 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students. Fall semester. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to the analytical methods and skills necessary for the creation of costumes for theater and dance with emphasis on the integration of costume with other visual elements. Western costume history. Lab work in costume construction.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 12 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students. Fall semester. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores the process of directing plays for the stage. Studio exercises develop skills in key areas: interpretation of form and artistic intent, perception and sensibility in rehearsal, effective communication with actors, and balancing the interplay between action and text. Students stage scenes from distinct categories: plays in verse, realistic plays, and non-realistic or less literal modern and contemporary plays. Special emphasis is placed on the role of dramaturgical understanding in the creation of meaningful stage action. Text is chosen from a wide repertoire, including Euripides’ The Bacchae, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Molière’s The Misanthrope, Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Samuel Beckett’s Not I, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Sarah Kane’s Crave, and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping & F**king. The course culminates in a co-directed group adaptation or extended section of a complex work. Throughout, students manage class work with peers to achieve mutual goals and fulfill roles in acting, organization and production as needed. Class meetings incorporate discussion of historical and theoretical readings and play texts. Two meetings per week. Students should expect to schedule outside rehearsal time as needed.
Requisites: Two of the following--Theater and Dance 11, 12 or 13. Fall semester. Professor Bashford.
What is theatrical sound design? Introduction to sound design attempts to answer that question, exploring what sound design is, how to look at a text and launch your creative process, and how to take the ideas based on that creative process and turn them into sounds to be used in a show. This is all done through a series of introductory lab projects and then a complete design for a short play, all while learning three new pieces of software. This is a highly interactive class, where student participation is key; students will be expected to take part in each other’s projects, as well as to create their own work.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 12 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offered
One of two studio courses in the theory and process of realizing a previously written play on the stage. This course will experiment with methods of staging Farce and Comedy through dramaturgical analysis and workshop staging of texts
chosen from such playwrights as Moliere, Carlo Goldoni, Richard Brinsley Sherridan, Georges Feydeau, Tom Stoppard, and Christopher Durang. Class sessions will focus on staging scenes, working with actors to discover the comic material inherent in written texts and clarifying the playwright’s intent.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 11, 12 or 13. Omitted 2010-11.
2023-24: Not offeredThis advanced production class will give students an opportunity to explore various relationships between live performance and video. Experiments will include creating short performance pieces and/or choreography specifically designed for the video medium; creating short pieces that include both live performance and projected video; and creating short experimental video pieces that emphasize a sense of motion in their conceptualization, and realization. Techniques and languages from dance and theater composition will be used to expand and inform approaches to video production and vice-versa. Sessions include studio practice (working with digital cameras and Final Cut Pro digital editing) and regular viewing and critiques. Students will work both independently and in collaborative teams according to interest and expertise.
Requisite: Previous experience in theater, dance, music composition, and/or video production or consent of the instructor. Limited to 10 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredThis studio production class will focus on multiple ways of tracking, viewing, and capturing bodies in motion. The course will emphasize working with the camera as an extension of the body to explore radically different points of view and senses of focus. We will experiment with different techniques and different kinds of bodies (human, animal, and object) to bring a heightened awareness of kinesthetic involvement, animation and emotional immediacy to the bodies on screen and behind the camera. In addition, we will interject and follow bodies into different perceptions of time, progression, place and relationship. In the process, we will express various experiences and theories of embodiment and question what constitutes a body. Depending on student interests, final projects can range from choreographies for the camera to fictional narratives to documentary studies. The class will alternate between camera sessions, both in the studio and on location, and sessions in the editing suite working with Final Cut Pro.
Requisite: Previous experience in composition. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2010-11. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredWhat creative opportunities and limitations does duet work occasion? Creating a duet with another person requires collaboration, but how do you collaborate with an object, or with something as evanescent as light? This course will explore the concept of duet work through the lens of three separate choreographic projects, focused, respectively, on the body, objects and light. Course work and research will include short compositional experiments, structured improvisations, readings and video viewings.
Instructor consent required for students with no experience in improvisation or composition.
Spring semester. Five College Dance Professor Coleman.
2023-24: Not offeredA workshop/seminar for writers who want to complete a full-length play or series of plays. Emphasis will be on bringing a script to a level where it is ready for the stage. Although there will be some exercises in class to continue the honing of playwriting skills and the study of plays by established writers as a means of exploring a wide range of dramatic vocabularies, most of the class time will be spent reading and commenting on the plays of the workshop members as these plays progress from the first draft to a finished draft.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 31 or the equivalent. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 10 students. Spring semester. Playwright-in-Residence Congdon.
2023-24: Not offeredAn advanced course in the techniques of creating performance. Each student will create and rehearse a performance piece that develops and incorporates original choreography, text, music, sound and/or video. Experimental and collaborative structures and approaches among and within different media will be stressed. The final performance pieces and events will be presented in the Holden Theater. Can be taken more than once for credit.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 35 or the equivalent and consent of the instructor. Fall semester. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is a continuation of Theater and Dance 64, an advanced course in the arts of theatrical design. Primary focus is on the communication of design ideas and concepts with other theater artists. Also considered is the process by which developing theatrical ideas and images are realized. Students will undertake specific projects in scenic, costume and/or lighting design and execute them in the context of the department’s production program or in other approved circumstances. Students in this course will design for a full-scale production. In all cases, detailed analysis of the text and responsible collaboration will provide the basis of the working method. May be repeated for credit.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 41, 42, or 43 or consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Dougan.
An advanced course in the arts of theatrical design. Primary focus is on the communication of design ideas and concepts with other theater artists. Also considered is the process by which developing theatrical ideas and images are realized. Students will undertake specific projects in scenic, costume and/or lighting design and execute them in the context of the Department’s production program or in other approved circumstances. Examples of possible assignments include designing workshop productions, and assisting faculty and staff designers with major responsibilities in full-scale production. In all cases, detailed analysis of the text and responsible collaboration will provide the basis of the working method. May be repeated for credit.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 41, 42, or 43 or consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredThis is a practical course in navigating the myriad positions and tasks that directors master to lead collaborators toward completed theatrical interpretations of dramatic texts. Studio exercises are employed throughout as each student director produces and directs two medium-length projects. Topics of focus include the articulation of coherent artistic intent, the role of the audience in performance, and the use of space, sound and light. In addition, this course considers organizational and research methods related to successful production. Readings and class sessions are devoted to the history and practice of directing and to discussion of problems and approaches. Two class meetings per week. Students should expect to schedule a significant amount of rehearsal time for the successful completion of projects.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 45 or equivalent college-level experience with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Bashford.
An advanced course in acting. The class will focus upon the actor’s close analysis of the playwright’s script to define specific problems and to set out tactics for their solutions. The interaction of the actor’s creative work outside rehearsal and the work within rehearsal will be delineated by assigned exercises.
Requisite: Theater and Dance 13 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 16 students. Fall semester. Resident Artist Lobdell.
2023-24: Not offeredAn advanced course in the production of Theater and Dance works. Primary focus will be on the integration of the individual student into a leadership role within the Department’s producing structure. Each student will accept a specific responsibility with a departmental production team testing his or her artistic, managerial, critical, and problem-solving skills.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Spring semester. The Department.
2023-24: Not offeredFor Honors candidates in Theater and Dance.
Open to seniors. Spring semester. The Department.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent Reading Course. Half course.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. The Department.
2023-24: Not offered