Using a variety of texts–novels, essays, short stories–this course will work to develop the reading and writing of difficult prose, paying particular attention to the kinds of evidence and authority, logic and structure that produce strong arguments. The authors we study may include Peter Singer, Aravind Adiga, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Charles Johnson, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, William Carlos Williams. This is an intensive writing course. Frequent short papers will be assigned.
Preference given to first-year students. Limited to 12 students. Fall and spring semesters. Fall semester: Professor Barale and Dean Lieber. Spring semster: Dean Lieber.
2023-24: Not offeredA first course in reading fictional, dramatic, and lyric texts: stories, a major novel, one or more plays by Shakespeare, poems by Donne, Dickinson, Frost, and others.
Why does any writer–an Amherst College student, Philip Roth, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare–say what he or she says one way rather than another? And what in the expression itself makes a story, a play, a poem effective, something a reader might care about, be moved or delighted by? We will try to answer these questions by reading primary examples of each genre, including much recent work, with close and sustained attention to details of expressive language. There will be frequent writing exercises.
The course will be taught in sections of 15 students. Preference will be given to first-year students. Fall semester: Professor Sofield. Spring semester: Professor Emeritus Berek (Mount Holyoke College).
2023-24: Not offeredIn 1852, Karl Marx observed that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Modernism–the aesthetic response to the experience of modernity–can be understood as a way to cast off that nightmare through the revolutionary force of the new. In this course, arranged around thematic clusters such as The City, Alienation, Primitivism, The New Woman, War, Speed, and Consciousness, we will range widely through European and Anglo-American writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries as we look at the explosion of styles and approaches that characterize modernism in all its dazzling vivacity and disruption.
Preference given to first-year students. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Pritchett.
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 Cobham-Sander. Spring semester: Visiting Lecturer B. Sánchez-Eppler.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025With a focus on the skills of close reading and analytical writing, we will look at the ways in which writers imagine illness, how they try to make meaning out of illness, and how they use illness to explore other aspects of experience. This is not a course on the history of illness or the social construction of disease. We will discuss not only what writers say about illness but also how they say it: with what language and in what form they speak the experience of bodily and mental suffering. Readings may include drama by Sophocles, Molière and Margaret Edson; poetry by Donne and Mark Doty; fiction by José Saramago and Mark Haddon; and essays by Susan Sontag, Raphael Campo and Temple Grandin.
Preference given to first-year students. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Bosman.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2014, Spring 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2025A study of what might be referred to as “classical American literature” or “The Age of Emerson.” The writers studied will be Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Among the central questions asked are these: How successful were these writers in their efforts to create a distinctively American language and literature? What was their view of nature and of human nature? How did they dramatize social conflict? In what ways did they affirm or challenge traditional conceptions of gender? The course will pay close attention to the interactions of these writers with one another and will give particular emphasis to Emerson as the figure with whom the others had to come to terms.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Guttmann.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course offers students an opportunity to explore the relationships of literary works to one another, their readers, and the field of literary studies. We will read a series of works written by American authors between 1880 and 1930, putting canonical and lesser-known writers into conversation with one another. The conversation theme will inform not only the works we read but also shape how we read, write, and “converse” in class and through assignments. For each set of readings, we will consider multiple conversations: the processes by which readers respond to texts, thereby participating in a dialogue with writers; the “cultural debates” to which the authors, their texts, and readers contribute; and the role of critics and literary criticism in shaping and sustaining discussions about writers and their works.
Preference given to first-year and sophomore students. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Bergoffen.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 153 and WAGS 112.) This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turning of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts written by a diverse group of women that present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
Preference given to first-year students and sophomores. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Lecturer Bergoffen.
2023-24: Not offeredThis 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 offeredIn the United States, as in many countries, we divide ourselves into regions. Differences in language and/or dialect, in history, in customs and politics, are often seen as legitimating regional divisions. The South has always held an especially powerful place in the American imagination, even before the Civil War. Through close encounters with texts and music, we will explore the differences within the South, the ways in which particular literary texts have come to be seen not just as representing the South but, in part, constituting its difference, and the complex roles played by race, ethnicity, and class. Among the writers and musicians we will study: Louis Armstrong, Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Breece D.J. Pancake, William Faulkner, Hank Williams, and the Carter Family.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor O'Connell.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 160 and BLST 132 [US].) The focus of this introduction to African American literature is the complex intertextuality at the heart of the African American literary tradition. Tracing the tradition’s major formal and thematic concerns means looking for connections between different kinds of texts: music, art, the written word, and the spoken word–-and students who take this class will acquire the critical writing and interpretive skills necessary to any future study of literature.
Fall semester. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 180 and FAMS 110.) A first course in reading films and writing about them. A varied selection of films for study and criticism, partly to illustrate the main elements of film language and partly to pose challenging texts for reading and writing. Frequent short papers. Two 80-minute class meetings and two screenings per week.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester: Visiting Professor Johnston. Spring semester: Visiting Lecturer Pritchett.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2025This 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 2011 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 2012-13. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offeredOver the last twenty-five years literary historians and critics have completely remade the field of American literature. The important artistic contributions of women, of African Americans, of Latinos, of Asian Americans, and of Native Americans have received attention and appreciation. In many instances long-forgotten texts have been uncovered and appreciated as first-rate works of art. Neglected artists like Willa Cather and James Weldon Johnson have been reread, re-seen. The goal of this four-semester sequence is to survey American literature from its beginnings to the present in a history that attempts to bring together what were once considered the classics with the most important of the newer additions to the body of American literature. In doing so our primary attention will be on texts of exceptional literary merit.
Once American literature began with the Pilgrims and Puritans, though they were latecomers among the Europeans in the Americas. In this course we will begin with the oral traditions of some of the native inhabitants and then read accounts from the European discovery and conquest, Spanish, French, and English: Columbus, Verrazano, Cartier, Cortes, Bradford, and others. Then we will read the literature of the settlers: diaries, sermons, captivity narratives, and autobiographies. In the eighteenth century we will follow the emerging literature of independence, not only that written by Anglo-Americans, but also the writings of Africans and African Americans like Olaudah Equiano. We will end the course with the literature of post-independence: novels by Charles Brockden Brown and Rebecca Rush.
Limited to 40 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor O'Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredOver the last twenty-five years literary historians and critics have completely remade the field of American literature. The important artistic contributions of women, of African Americans, of Latinos, of Asian Americans, and of Native Americans have received attention and appreciation. In many instances long-forgotten texts have been uncovered and appreciated as first-rate works of art. Neglected artists like Willa Cather and James Weldon Johnson have been reread, re-seen. The goal of this four-semester sequence is to survey American literature from its beginnings to the present in a history that attempts to bring together what were once considered the classics with the most important of the newer additions to the body of American literature. In doing so our primary attention will be on texts of exceptional literary merit.
The 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 2012-13. Professor O'Connell.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2025Over the last thirty some years literary historians and critics have completely remade the field of American literature. The important artistic contributions of women, of African Americans, of Latinos, of Asian Americans, and of Native Americans have received attention and appreciation. In many instances long-forgotten texts have been uncovered and accepted as first-rate works of art. Known but neglected artists have been reread, re-seen. An important goal of this course is bringing what were once considered the classics together with the most important of the newer additions to the body of American literature. In doing so our primary attention will be on texts of exceptional literary merit: fiction and non-fiction and poetry.
This course begins with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, two of a number of writers who, in the 1950s, made Jewish American literature a central part of American literature. Their dominance turned out to be quite brief and for the remainder of the century a rich abundance of writing appears, some of which can be labeled ethnically (American Indian, African American, Asian American, Latino), but what stands out is a range of imaginations and styles. Among the writers we may read: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Danzy Senna, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, Louise Erdrich, Ray Young Bear, Junot Diaz, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Chuck Palahniuk, Chris Hedges, and Joe Sacco (graphic non-fiction).
Limited to 40 students. Spring semester. Professors Brooks and O'Connell.
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.
Fall semester: Writer-in-Residence Hall. Spring semester: Professor Sofield and Simpson Lecturer Wilbur.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025We 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 to 12 students. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course. 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: Professor Douglas. Spring semester: Professor Frank.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025This course explores the unique challenges of experiencing performance through the page. While this course is not intended as a survey of dramatic literature or theater history, students will be introduced to a variety of drama from across the English-language tradition. The organizing theme of the course may change slightly from year to year, but the goal will always be to explore a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches to drama. Of particular interest will be the relationship of play-reading to other reading practices. What does a play demand of the reader that a novel, a poem, or an essay does not? How must the central elements of storytelling or world-making (character, plot, setting, dialogue, point of view, etc.) change when they are required to appear onstage?
Limited to 30 students. Fall semester. Professor Grobe.
2023-24: Not offeredA first course in the critical reading of selected English-language poets, which gives students exposure to significant poets, poetic styles, and literary and cultural contexts for poetry from across the tradition. Attention will be given to prosody and poetic forms, and to different ways of reading poems.
Limited to 35 students. Fall semester: Professor Nelson. Spring semester: Professor Sofield.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023An introduction to the study of the novel, through the exploration of a variety of critical terms (plot, character, point of view, tone, realism, identification, genre fiction, the book) and methodologies (structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic). We will draw on a selection of novels in English to illustrate and complicate those terms; possible authors include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Emma Donoghue, David Foster Wallace, Monique Truong, Jennifer Egan.
Preference given to sophomores. Limited to 35 students. Spring semester. Professor Frank.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2023Although little studied as a separate literary form, the book of interlinked short stories is a prominent (and increasingly popular) form of modern fiction. This course will slowly read and closely examine a variety of these compositions in order to better understand how they achieve their coherence and how they structure a larger story through an unfolding sequence of independent narratives. Works likely to be considered include Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and more recent collections by contemporary American and Anglophone writers. For each class meeting a pair of students will collaborate on presenting a reading of a story that links it to the larger whole in which it is integrated. The course includes frequent brief writing and concludes with an independent project on a chosen modern (or recent) example of this unusual genre of sequenced stories. Two class meetings per week.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Peterson.
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.
Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Gaige.
2023-24: Not offeredChildren’s books are a site of first encounter, a doorway to literacy and literature. This course will offer both a history of book production for child readers in England and the United States and an exploration of what these first books can teach us about the attractions, expectations, and responsibilities of reading.
Spring semester. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210.) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of a few critical and descriptive terms, together with a selection of various films (classic and contemporary, foreign and American) for illustration and discussion. The terms for discussion will include, among others: the cinematic image, mise en scène, montage and editing, narration in cinema, genre, authorship. Frequent critical writing required.
Limited to 35 students. Fall semester: Professor Cameron. Spring semester: Visiting Professor Johnston.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as ENGL 281, FAMS 220, and ARHA 272.) “Foundations and Integrations” will be an annual team-taught course between a Critical Studies scholar and moving-image artist. A requirement of the Film and Media Studies major, it will build on critical analysis of moving images and introductory production work to develop an integrated critical and creative practice. Focused in particular around themes and concepts, students will develop ideas in both written and visual form. The theme for spring 2013 will be “Film and Inner Life.”
Requisites: A foundations course in Critical Studies of Film and Media (such as “Coming to Terms: Cinema”) and an introductory film/video production workshop. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Hastie and Visiting Lecturer Johnson.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2017(Offered as ENGL 287 and FAMS 228.) This course will introduce students to basic Super 8 film and digital video techniques. The course will include workshops in shooting for film and video, Super 8 film editing, Final Cut Pro video editing, lighting, stop motion animation, sound recording and mixing. Students will learn to think about and look critically at the moving and still image. Students will complete three moving image projects, including one Super 8 film, one video project, and one mixed media project. Weekly screenings will introduce students to a wide range of approaches to editing, writing, and directing in experimental, documentary, narrative, and hybrid cinematic forms. Screenings include works by Martha Rosler, Bill Viola, the Yes Men, Jennifer Reeves, Mona Hatoum, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dziga Vertov, D.A. Pennebaker, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Cécile Fontaine, and Johanna Vaude.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 13 students. Please complete the questionnaire at https://cms.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/english/events/questionnaire. Omitted 2012-13. Five College Professor Hillman.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 289 and FAMS 222.) The topic changes each time the course is taught. In spring 2013 the topic will be “Production Foundations: Image and Sound.” What is the relationship between image and sound in video? How does listening affect what we see and imagine? This class will cover the technical and aesthetic fundamentals of video production including composition, framing, camera movement, lighting, audio recording, and digital editing using Final Cut Pro. Sonic expression will play a leading role in our exploration of video production and interpretation. The art of audio and the function of sound for the screen will be considered through hands-on exercises, screenings, readings, and discussion. Students will create non-fiction and narrative videos with dynamic employments of sound as we develop a critical vocabulary of the audiovisual medium. One three-hour class meeting and one film screening per week.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Please complete the questionnaire at https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/english/major/course_applications. Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer EE Miller.
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 were lyric, narrative, author, translation, and autobiography.
Preference given to sophomores. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Bosman.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023, Spring 2025To be taught in fall 2012 as ENGL 472.
Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will explore ventriloquism as a literary and cultural phenomenon. What does it mean to “throw” one’s voice? How is a ventriloquized voice different from one’s “own”? Why has the possibility of ventriloquism stimulated the literary imagination from the ancient world to the present?
Discussion will focus on novels, poems, plays, films, and essays bearing on the relationship between voice and body. Requirements include voice-throwing and other in-class exercises, contributions to a class wiki, frequent short papers and a final exam.
Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parker.
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 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Christoff.
2023-24: Not offered[before 1800] This course provides an introduction to some of the most popular texts of the medieval and Renaissance periods in England by focusing on stories of Christian-Muslim encounter. These stories of interfaith conflict and union offer an important prehistory to the highly-charged relations between Christians and Muslims today. Such interfaith encounters lay at the center of numerous early modern texts, generating a wide variety of stories about love, warfare, friendship, and conversion. We will place these stories in their proper historical contexts, learning about the history of the Crusades as well as about the rise of English commerce with the Ottoman empire. How did literature contribute to the formations of religious, national, and racial identity? We will consider the interrelations between literary form and cultural history, as well as the significance of genre in shaping stories of Christian-Muslim encounter. Texts include poetry, prose, and drama by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Mandeville, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Wortley Montagu, and others.
Omitted 2012-13. Five College Professor Degenhardt.
2023-24: Not offered[before 1800] The 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.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Emeritus Townsend.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2022, Fall 2023“The word ‘suffer,’” Nietzsche writes, is something that we “set up . . . at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further.” What makes suffering especially mysterious–and especially attractive as an element of story-telling–is that it both escapes secure designation and refuses to be ineffable; it is a Thing, neither fully beyond nor fully within our ken. It provokes a desire to give it shape and a desire to do no more than approach its shapelessness; it occasions humanitarian crises and stands beyond them as an unbudgeable element of existence; it rings like a pure gold coin and like an alarm bell that cannot be shut off. In this course, we will be studying a series of thematically connected but wildly different works that model especially suggestive ways of approaching this phenomenon. Readings will include the Book of Job, King Lear, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Owen Chase’s shipwreck narrative, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Fall semester. Professor Sanborn.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023Readings 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.
Spring semester. Professor Pritchard.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Spring 2016, Fall 2018, Fall 2023, Spring 2025Readings 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 2012-13. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023(Offered as ENGL 309 and EUST 309.) A 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. Spring semester. Professor Cameron.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013A 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 2012-13. Professor Peterson.
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.
Omitted 2012-13. Professor Pritchard.
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.
Omitted 2012-13. Professor Frank.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course we will read novels about revolutionaries and about violent responses to oppression. Most were written for and about particular social problems. Yet revolutionaries often appeal to novelists precisely because they seem to represent much more than the social problem they seek to reform. The course examines the extent to which this representative quality can help and hinder a novel’s status as globally lasting art. Two critical questions among the many we will explore are: How does the novel reconcile the long aims of literature with the urgent claims of the present? What happens when historically specific stories are smuggled across national borders, or revisited a century later? How, for example, does a novelist writing about Kenya, a former British colony, relate to the literary heritage of the British colonizers? Readings will include novels by Dickens, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Henry James, Conrad, Ngugi, and others.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2020, January 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023(Offered as ENGL 317 and BLST 252 [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.
Fall semester. Professor Cobham-Sander.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 318 and BLST 362 [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. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Cobham-Sander.
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: ENGL 221 or the equivalent. Limited enrollment. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course. Fall semester. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2023, Spring 2025A 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.
Limited to 15 students. Preregistration is not allowed. Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course. Spring semester. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
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. Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Writer Gaige.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025Walt Whitman’s radical poetics changed the landscape of American and international poetry. With his long, unmetered lines and his adaptation of Transcendental ideas of intersubjectivity, he expanded the possibilities for a poem’s form and content. This course begins with an extended study of Whitman’s poetry against the literary context from which it emerged, both in America and abroad (including French symbolism), and continues by studying poets influenced by Whitman in the twentieth century (Ginsberg, Neruda, and others). We will ask, does Whitmanian poetics demand a different reading practice than we bring to formal poetry? Are Whitman’s innovations in form and content separable? Is one more influential to modern poetry than the other?
Recommended: A previous course in English. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] This 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[before 1800] The 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.
Spring semester. Professor Chickering.
2023-24: Not offered[before 1800] A 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).
Omitted 2012-13. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offered[before 1800] The 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.
Recommended requisite: A previous course in Shakespeare or Renaissance literature. Fall semester. Professor Bosman.
2023-24: Not offered[before 1800] Readings in the comedies, histories, and tragedies, with attention to their poetic language, dramatic structure, and power in performance. Texts and topics will vary by instructor.
Limited to 50 students. Fall semester: Professor Emeritus Berek (Mount Holyoke College). Spring semester: Professor Grobe.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course offers a survey of tragedy as a genre of theatrical representation, charting the development and crisis of the form. We will read texts from the classical and contemporary dramatic repertoire coupled with theoretical readings and documentation of performance. Readings may include plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine, Buchner, Miller and Parks, among others. Attendance at weekly screenings and/or local performances is required.
Omitted 2012-13. Five College Mellon Fellow Sack.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2016, Fall 2023[Before 1800] Readings in the literature of the British Isles from the medieval and early modern periods. We will read masterpieces of English literature by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton alongside lesser-known works by anonymous authors, chroniclers, and women. Our focus will be on the emergence of a distinctly “English” literature, defined by shifting ideas of language, nation, and world from the seventh through seventeenth centuries.
Spring semester. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offeredA selection of mid-nineteenth-century English novels approached from various critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives. In spring 2011 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 2012-13. Professor Parker.
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 2012-13. Professor Pritchard.
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 2012-13. Professor Cameron.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course, we will be reading the works of two American writers who are associated not only with the South, but with haunted fictional worlds, worlds whose tense inwardness is uncannily bound to historical traumas. The aim of the course is to become more sensitive to the implications of each of these writers’ works, more broadly conversant with the history of the South and of the nation more generally, and more aware of how questions about form and style can help us formulate more sharply focused questions about culture and subjectivity. Readings will include Poe’s only book-length fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; a healthy (or unhealthy) sampling of his tales and poems; three Faulkner novels–Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!–and several of his stories.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offeredTo be taught in fall 2012 as ENGL 444.
Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offeredThe focus of the course will be on education within the United States. Many Americans believe that a free public educational system is crucial in a democratic society. What concretely does this mean? The question has shaped a persistent and unresolved debate throughout American history to the present, as it will our work together. Two fundamental and contradictory questions have centered nearly every controversy: 1. Should education be a competitive system to establish and legitimate a hierarchy of merit? 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? Another assumption also moves through these debates: that schools are the primary generators of equality or inequality.
The course will not seek to resolve these questions and issues, but to explore how the different assumptions 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. Considerable attention will go to the educational reforms of the last thirty years including the role of institutions such as Teach for America.
Requisite: ENGL 120 or an equivalent course or experience in public education. Limited to 35 students. Spring semester. Professor O’Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredNovels and short fiction, mainly comic, by such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Taylor, Kingsley Amis, John Updike, Philip Roth, Nicholson Baker, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Pym. The effort will be to refine and complicate one’s performance as a critic of these writers and their books.
Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Pritchard.
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.
Omitted 2012-13. Writer-in-Residence Hall.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 360 and BLST 342 [US].) The topic changes each time the course is taught. In spring 2011 the topic was “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 examined 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. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parham.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023(Offered as ENGL 361, BLST 232 [US], and FAMS 372.) 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. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parham.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023Ethnicity. 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 2012-13. Professor Hayashi.
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. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offeredThis semester we will consider works by post-bellum writers who clearly emerged out of recognizable narrative traditions, but who nonetheless pushed the boundaries of those traditions, particularly vis-à-vis their inclusion of other media, disparate or conflicted genre desires, historical exigency, or some other kind of narrative emergency. Beginning with brief introductions to romanticism, realism, naturalism, and modernism in American literature, over the course of the semester we will work to understand the kinds of narrative strategies that have in different eras signified important shifts in what the novel “is” or prognosticated what it could be. We will end by investigating some genre-bending, media-crossing trends in contemporary prose narrative: graphic novels, hypertext media, and other kinds of hybrid texts. The novel is not dead, and it definitely remains novel. The diverse range of writers we will be reading this semester will likely include: Hawthorne, Chesnutt, Dreiser, Larsen, Faulkner, Toomer, Kingston, Tomasula, and Gayl Jones.
Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parham.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2024“I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced,” Thoreau writes in Walden. “Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded.” The aim of this course is to seek in a series of fictional extravaganzas by American authors a better understanding of how we are generally yarded, as readers of stories and novels, and what opens up for us when that yard expands. What does a wildness of invention, an insistent pressure on the confines of literary forms, make it possible for us to feel and know? What aspects of American cultural history are exposed to our view when writers freewheelingly generate, in Melville’s words, “more reality than real life itself can show”? Readings include Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the stories of Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, and Mat Johnson’s Pym.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course surveys the literature and culture of the Victorian era. Reading novels, poetry, and non-fiction, we will ask how the Victorians lived, worked, and played, and how they imagined such essential differences in lifestyle as those between the wealthy and the working classes, between men and women, and between the young and the old. Topics include the life of Queen Victoria, the “invention” of childhood, life-writing and gender, the Industrial Revolution and factory work, religious belief and secular culture, evolutionary science, and an essential Victorian literary obsession: gaining access to the minds and inner lives of others.
Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Christoff.
(Offered as ENGL 374, BLST 330 [US], and FAMS 358.) In offering extended formal considerations of Spike Lee’s cinematic oeuvre–in particular his uses of light, sound, and color–this course is interested in how shifting through various modes of critical inquiry can enable or broaden different kinds of cultural, political, or historical engagement with a film. This semester we will also pay special attention to the question of what it means to encapsulate a particular cultural moment, particularly vis-à-vis the often differing demands of fictional and non-fictional representation.
Spring semester. Professor Parham and Visiting Professor Drabinski.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 379 and FAMS 380.) Throughout its history artists and filmmakers have experimented radically with cinema, exploring the limits of the medium. This course traces the history of experimentation and its relation to broader avant-garde movements in the arts, such as Symbolism, Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism. Many of the filmmakers and movements we will study set about creating a new type of film, as well as a new kind of film language, in an attempt to re-orient how individuals engage with art in their everyday lives. We will interrogate broad theoretical questions, such as: What is the avant-garde? What is the relation between cinema and different art movements? How are different revolutionary aesthetic practices tied to political projects? How are mainstream and avant-garde cinemas related? What can cinema do beyond providing representations and narratives? Besides theoretical and critical texts by Peter Bürger, Renato Poggioli, Annette Michelson and Michael Fried, we will examine manifestos and documents from the various movements, as well as historical studies. We will view films by artists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Jean Epstein, Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren, Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, and Stan Brakhage. Two class meetings and one required screening per week.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Johnston.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 381 and FAMS 351.) Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer declared that some of the first films showed “life at its least controllable and most unconscious moments, a jumble of transient, forever dissolving patterns accessible only to the camera.” This course will explore the ways contemporary narrative films aesthetically represent everyday life–capturing both its transience and our everyday ruminations. We will further consider the ways we incorporate film into our everyday lives through various modes of viewings (the arthouse, the multiplex, the DVD, the mp3), our means of perception, and in the kinds of souvenirs we keep. We will look at films by Chantal Akerman, Robert Altman, Marleen Gorris, Hirokazu Koreeda, Marzieh Makhmalbaf, Terrence Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Agnès Varda, Wong Kar-wai, and Andy Warhol. Readings will include work by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Marlene Dietrich, Sigmund Freud, and various works in film and media studies. Two class meetings and one screening per week.
Not open to first-year students. Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 387 and FAMS 215.) The topic changes each time the course is taught. In fall 2010 the topic was “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. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 388 and FAMS 240.) A first workshop in narrative screenwriting. Through frequent exercises, readings, and screenings we will explore the fundamentals of scene and story shape as they’re practiced in mainstream commercial filmmaking, while taking a broader look at what a screenplay might be outside of that world. In the process, we’ll juxtapose two modes of writing that are not mutually exclusive but are often at odds with each other, both historically (within the industry) and aesthetically: the well-established craft of three-act screenwriting, on the one hand, and the more elastic possibilities of the audio-visual medium as exemplified by the art film, on the other. One class meeting per week.
Requisites: Two classes from any of the following categories in any combination: critical studies of film and media; film/video production; creative writing workshops (fiction or non-fiction); playwriting; photography or drawing courses. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Preference will be given to English, Film and Media Studies, and Art majors.
Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Johnson.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2015, Spring 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as ENGL 391 and FAMS 331.) What is a medium? Why has the term acquired its current theoretical prominence? How does it differ from discourse, genre, mode, format, and other such terms? This course surveys accounts of mediation from the ancient world to the present, focusing on key figures and historically-important texts (among them, Plato’s Republic, Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) before turning attention to our contemporary mediascape and some recent attempts to take its theoretical measure.
Not open to first-year students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parker.
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.
Omitted 2012-13.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012This course looks at our penal system and places it in the context of the economic and political development of the U.S. It begins with the introduction of the penitentiary in the antebellum period at a time of extraordinary economic expansion and optimism about social institutions. After the Civil War ideas of criminal control change as rapid industrialization in the North and large waves of immigration produce labor unrest and unprecedented urban poverty. The course also explores the convict-lease system in the post-emancipation “New South.” It looks, too, at Progressives’ creation of the juvenile justice system at the turn of the century as well as ideas linking criminality with heredity. It ends with the current boom in prison populations. Throughout it closely attends prisoners’ accounts of their experiences and how they represent them in diverse literary forms.
The course will be conducted inside a correctional facility and enroll an equal number of Amherst students and residents of the facility. Permission to enroll will be granted on the basis of a questionnaire and personal interview with the instructor. Amherst students studying the philosophical and material development of the penal system in the company of incarcerated men will get the benefit of their fellow students’ personal experience of that system. This setting creates a pedagogical opportunity to bring together genuinely diverse perspectives. One class meeting per week.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor O’Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will focus on the manuscript culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, using manuscripts as a means of thinking about the act of writing, the implications of audience and publication, and the relations between the private and public word. We will study the private forms of diaries and letters. We will look at the traces of the writing process in manuscripts of ultimately published works–the window into the literary creation that manuscripts provide. We will also confront the problems raised by literary work that was never published during its author’s lifetime, heedful of the questions of social propriety and power that often inform what can and can’t be published. Texts will include Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite, a “closet” manuscript of sexual indeterminacy written in the 1840s and only published in 2004; Hannah Crafts’ The Bondswoman’s Tale, a manuscript novel probably written in the late 1850s by a fugitive slave and first published in 2002; the manuscript books of Emily Dickinson; the posthumous publication process of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems; and works like Edgar Allan Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle” and Henry James’ The Aspern Papers that tell anxious tales about manuscripts. The heart of the course, however, will be independent research with students drawing on rich local archives to do some manuscript recovering of their own.
Limited to 15 students. Juniors and Seniors only. Omitted 2012-13. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
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.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Guttmann.
2023-24: Not offeredThis is an advanced writing course for students seeking to move their fiction writing into longer forms. Students will be expected to complete at least 60 pages of new writing, comprised of three different “approaches” to novel writing. Readings will be extensive, including published novels, the work of peers, and essays on theory and craft. One class meeting per week.
Requisite: ENGL 226. Recommended requisite: ENGL 326. Open to juniors and seniors. 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 offered[before 1800] By studying selected Shakespeare plays and their afterlives in literature and performance, we will explore the fate of culture over centuries of global mobility. What qualities of Shakespeare’s works render them peculiarly adaptable to a world of intercultural conflict, borrowing and fusion? And what light does the translation and adaptation of Shakespeare shed on the dialectic of cultural persistence and change? Our examples may include European literature and theater; American silent film and musicals; post-colonial appropriations in India, Africa and Latin America; and versions in the drama, opera and cinema of China and Japan. The course includes an independent research project on a chosen case study.
Requisite: ENGL 338 (Shakespeare). Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Bosman.
2023-24: Not offeredPlot is never the only motor driving drama forward, though it is the most conspicuous. This class focuses on a long tradition of playwrights using argument--instead of, or alongside plot--to structure their plays. Readings in drama (mainly from the eighteenth century to the present) will be supplemented by consideration of the “dramatic” traditions in philosophy and in philosophical poetry. We will also pay particular attention to those playwrights who have written simultaneously in dramatic and essayistic forms. Why (and when) is thought theatrical? Featured playwrights include Addison and Steele, Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Churchill, and Kushner.
Junior/Senior seminar. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Grobe.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2013, Spring 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2021[before 1800] (Offered as ENGL 441 and EUST 441.) No word for lyric poetry is in use in Europe until the sixteenth century. This course examines the poems written before and at the dawn of the definition of lyric poetry, in order to form our own working definition of a short, musical poem. We will read poetry by Sappho, Horace, Pindar, anonymous medieval writers, Richard Rolle, William Dunbar, and others, along with classical and medieval tracts on poetry and poetics. The course will conclude with readings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric poets (Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, Donne) alongside the treatises that defined lyric for the first time (such as Sidney’s Defense of Poesy). Does the “lyric” poem change once it is defined? How do later works speak to the earlier tradition?
Requisite: At least one previous English course, preferably in poetry. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Nelson.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2020, Spring 2022A seminar devoted to the work of an eclectic list of poets active from the 1850s to the 2010s: Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Francis, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, and Seamus Heaney.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, with preference to junior English majors. Although an English Department seminar, students not majoring in English are welcome. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Sofield and Simpson Lecturer Wilbur.
2023-24: Not offeredWho are the earlier poets whose work remains acutely alive in the minds of recent and contemporary poets, critics, scholars, and what Samuel Johnson called, respectfully, common readers? This seminar will consider the thesis that the short and mid-length poems of John Donne, George Herbert, William Wordsworth, and Robert Frost make the case that these poets belong high on the list of those who are read now with the kind of attention that the range of readers gives to today’s major writers. Beginning with Donne in the 1590s and concluding with Frost in the 1950s, the work of the poets will be considered, in detail, from historical, formal, and religious/philosophical points of view. In addition, we will read examples of the abundant criticism devoted to each of the four.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, with preference to junior English majors. Although an English Department seminar, students not majoring in English are welcome. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Sofield and Simpson Lecturer Wilbur.
2023-24: Not offered“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.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offeredIs any term in the study of literature more contested than lyric? Reaching agreement on a definition beyond Aristotle’s obvious claim that lyric may be distinguished from epic and dramatic has proved impossible. Yet what critics have named lyric poems have been written for two and a half millennia, and for two centuries now the lyric has been the dominant poetic mode. With an eye to its literary-historical development, this seminar will undertake to read closely the English-language lyric from the sixteenth century to the present. Attention will be given to concurrent attempts to describe its properties, concluding with recent considerations of the genre. Two class meetings per week.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Sofield and Simpson Lecturer Wilbur.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course, students will become proficient in research methods related to the study of poetry. Focusing on select periods from the English language poetic tradition, we will read poems alongside historical contexts, critical essays, and contemporary treatises on poetics. The central question we will explore is, how can close reading benefit from secondary research? Students will be expected to present course material, and to choose a specific poet or group of poems as the basis of the final project, a long literary critical research paper.
This advanced seminar is designed for students who have previous training in close reading and analysis of poetry. In spring 2013 we will focus our readings on the Metaphysical poets, the Romantic poets, and their contemporaries.
A previous course in poetry is recommended. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offeredDuring a mountain picnic in the summer of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville struck up a private conversation. That champagne-fueled talk led to an intense, maddening, and relatively brief friendship, a friendship that grew out of writing, that was mediated by writing, and that can only be approached by way of writing. What was it like? How did it affect each of them? What might it suggest about the nature of the intimacies that are made possible by words on a page? In pursuit of the answers to these and other questions, we will read everything that Hawthorne and Melville wrote between July 1849 and December 1852. That will mean reading, in addition to White-Jacket, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, The House of the Seven Gables, A Wonder Book, Pierre, and The Blithedale Romance, all of their letters, journals, and marginalia. We will also take trips to Melville’s house in Pittsfield and the House of the Seven Gables in Salem.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offeredA study of two major writers whose works span five decades. Their careers will be followed by a chronological survey of each from the late 1950s to the present. They will be viewed biographically and historically, but mainly through close engagement with literary style.
Open to junior and senior majors. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 454 and BLST 442.) William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are generally understood as two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and indeed, the work of each is integral to American literature. But why are Morrison and Faulkner so often mentioned in the same breath–he, born in the South, white and wealthy, she, the daughter of a working-class black family in the Midwest? Perhaps it is because in a country that works hard to live without a racial past, both Morrison’s and Faulkner’s work bring deep articulation to the often unseen, and more commonly–the unspeakable. This class will explore the breadth of each author’s work, looking for where their texts converge and diverge. And we will learn how to talk and write about the visions, dreams, and nightmares–all represented as daily life–that these authors offer.
Junior/Senior seminar. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 455 and WAGS 495.) This course examines some of the many ways American authors have written about memory–memories of the past as well as of other places, about memories that refuse to be surfaced and memories that are at times not even of their protagonists’ own lives. How, for instance, do writers portray the ways painful pasts have influenced their characters’ senses of self-identity? What does it mean to suffer for a past whose details one does not even know? Is a truth freeing, or does overcoming the hidden and silent increase memory’s burdens? What are some of the possibilities and limitations of portraying traumatic experiences in the novel form? And can “trauma” even mean the same thing across ethnic experiences? With such questions in mind we will look specifically at novels concerned with two of the foundational experiences of American civilization, slavery and migration, and at the pervasive problems of longing, disjuncture, and displacement endemic to such experiences. Authors we may read in this cross-cultural literature course include Maxine Hong Kingston, Edwidge Danticat, Gayl Jones, and Cynthia Ozick.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 456, BLST 441 [US], and FAMS 451.) This class begins with narratives about individuals who pass–that is, who come to be recognized as someone different from whom they were sexually or racially “born as.” Such stories suggest that one’s identity depends minimally on the body into which one is born, and is more attached to the supplementation and presentation of that body in support of whichever cultural story the body is desired to tell. Drawing on familiar liberal humanist claims, which centralize human identity in the mind, these narratives also respond to the growing sophistication of human experience with virtual worlds–from acts of reading to immersions in computer simulation. But what kinds of tensions emerge when bodies nonetheless signify beyond an individual’s self-imagination? As technology expands the possibilities of the virtual, for instance surrogacy, cloning, and cybernetics, what pressures are brought to bear on the physical human body and its processes to signify authentic humanness? Rather than ask whether identity is natural or cultural, our discussions will project these questions into a not-so-distant future: What would it mean to take “human” as only one identity, as a category amongst many others, each also acknowledged as equally subject to the same social and biological matrices of desire, creation, and recognition? We will approach these questions through works of literature, philosophy, media history, and contemporary science writing.
Junior/Senior seminar. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 458 and AMST 358.) [before 1800] This course will delve deeply into the literature and history of “Turtle Island,” or North America. The Quiché Maya Popol Vuh (Council Book), the Iroquois Great Law, and the Wabanaki creation cycle are rooted in longstanding, complex oral narratives of emergence and transformation, which were recorded by Native authors and scribes. We will close read these epics (in English) as works of “ancient American” literature, as narratives of tribal history, and as living constitutions of tribal governance. We will study the tribally and regionally-specific contexts of these epic narratives as well as the “intellectual trade routes” that link them together. The course will conclude with an epic narrative of more recent colonial history, composed by the nineteenth-century Pequot author William Apess, born in the Connecticut River valley. Following an interdisciplinary American studies approach, our reading will be enriched by guest speakers and artistic media.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Brooks.
2023-24: Not offeredWhat if the past is not behind us, but spiraling within our present? How are indigenous conceptions of time expressed in Native American writing? How do Native novelists enable us to imagine a past, present, and future that are intertwined, embedded in place, and spiraling in constant motion? How does the creation of a fictional world, so similar to ours, allow us to envision alternative models of gender, sexuality, race, and nationhood? This seminar will invite in-depth exploration of contemporary Native American fiction, through frameworks drawn from oral traditions, indigenous languages, literary media, and scientific theory. Authors will include Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Craig Womack, among others.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Brooks.
2023-24: Not offered[before 1800] (Offered as ENGL 466, BLST 435 [US], and FAMS 314.) Mining a variety of archives in search of captivity narratives created by American slaves and their progeny, this class will use its materials to consider larger questions regarding the overlapping roles of voice, testimony, trauma, and narrative in cultural and historical understanding. Work for this semester will culminate in the production of a multimedia research project, but no previous familiarity with media production is required.
Junior/Senior seminar. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Parham.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course’s primary objective is to enable students to conduct independent and substantive research in literary studies. The vehicle to meet these goals will be the traditional canon of American literature. Reading, considering, and evaluating recent scholarship on a selection of canonical American literary texts will demonstrate how different theoretical frames and methodological approaches reveal textual content and meaning in unexpected ways. Such practices reconstitute our sense of even the most familiar texts. We will study this scholarship–in areas such as ecocriticism, sexuality studies, regionalism, cultural studies, postcolonialism–as a means to apprehend, appreciate, define, and ultimately model literary research. We will also consider and model various methods of analyzing literary texts: interdisciplinary, biographical, comparative and material. Moreover, we will focus intently on fundamental information gathering skills: finding, evaluating, and synthesizing both secondary and primary sources. Therefore, the course will entail formal sessions in library training and archival research. Students will conduct a major independent research project of their choice over the course of the semester. Authors may include Dickinson, Rowlandson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores psychoanalytic theory beyond Freud. Reading the work of modern and contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers in depth, we will ask as well what their theories teach us about reading itself. We will cover a range of modern psychoanalytic approaches, from ego psychology to the British object relations school to “contemporary Freudian revisionists.” Writers may include Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Harry Stack Sullivan, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Jacques Lacan, Otto Kernberg, Roy Schafer, and Christopher Bollas, among others. The course is organized around ideas and close reading: we will trace the evolution of a number of psychoanalytic concepts (such as hysteria, paranoia, aggression, aesthetic experience, dissociation, projection, and transference) from their foundations to the present day. In addition to learning about the history of psychoanalysis, its modern incarnations, and the development of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, we will consider how contemporary psychoanalysis offers us new approaches to reading, thinking, and cultural analysis.
Previous experience with courses in English and/or psychoanalysis recommended. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Christoff.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 481 and FAMS 421.) As an upper-division seminar in film theory, this course will offer an in-depth examination of historically significant writings that analyze film form and its social functions and effects. Our particular focus will be on the production of film theory in a collective setting: the film/media journal. Thus the course will be organized by five units, each centering on a particular journal in generally chronological order: Close Up, Cahiers du Cinéma, Film Culture, Screen, and Camera Obscura. Through this structure, we will consider how ideas have developed and transformed, often in dialogue with one another and on an international stage. Our purpose will be threefold: to understand the context for the production and development of film theories; to comprehend a wide range of changing theoretical notions and methodologies; and to create our own dialogue with these works, considering especially their impact on their own contemporaneous film viewers and on viewing positions today. One three-hour class meeting and one film screening per week.
Prior coursework in Film and Media Studies is strongly recommended. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 482 and FAMS 482.) This course focuses on cinephilia–a passionate, affective engagement with cinema–as a means of seeing both the movies themselves and our critical, historical understanding of them. While focusing on cinephilic figures (the archivist, the filmmaker, the critic, the theorist, the historian, the collector, the teacher, the student), we will also look at particular historical junctures in which cinephilia has arisen in earnest (the photogenie movement in 1910s and 1920s France; post-war French criticism and auteurist production; late twentieth-century enthrallment with international new wave movements). Through experiments with reading, writing, and viewing habits, we will inject theoretical work with experiential practices, ultimately asking how (and if) cinephilia might be mobilized today. One class meeting and one screening per week.
Prior film course recommended. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 483, FAMS 426, and WAGS 483.) This seminar will be devoted to the study of feminism and film, considering the ways feminism has shaped both film theory and film practice. Though focusing in large part on post-1968 writings, which largely ushered in semiotic, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory to film studies, we will also consider early writings by women from the 1910s-1950s in a range of venues–from fan magazines to film journals–that developed points of view regarding women’s practices as both artists and audience members. We will also consider a range of films, from Hollywood melodrama (also known as “the women’s picture”) of the 1940s to contemporary action films, and from avant-garde feminist works to current independent and international films directed by women. Informed by feminist film theorist Claire Johnston, we will explore how and when “women’s cinema”–whether theory or practice–constitutes or shapes “counter-cinema.” One three-hour class meeting per week.
Requisite: As an advanced seminar in film theory, some previous work with film and media studies is required. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 484 and FAMS 484.) This seminar will explore theories of animation and new media in moving image culture. While animation is many times considered children’s entertainment, this course situates it as the technical coincidence of life and movement while examining its relation to the nature of cinema and other media. Cinema is a privileged type of animation in the class, but one that exists in a long history of moving images that we will interrogate along with the roles different techniques and technologies play in that history’s formation. We will begin with an examination of nineteenth-century optical devices like zoetropes and phenakistoscopes and then study handmade and industrial animation practices, finally working our way to digital special effects technology, machinima, and algorithmic cinema. Particular attention will be paid to the role of motion in the aesthetics of cinema and the sense of vitality objects and figures take on in film. How is life attributed to this illusion of movement? How is the threshold between the animate and inanimate used to define our understandings of media and mediation? To answer these questions we will read theoretical and historical texts by Donald Crafton, Sergei Eisenstein, Tom Gunning, Esther Leslie, and Lev Manovich and view films by artists such as Emile Cohl, Lotte Reiniger, Mary Ellen Bute, Chuck Jones, the Quay Brothers, Lewis Klahr, Cory Arcangel, Marjane Satrapi, and Takeshi Murata. One three-hour class meeting and one required screening per week.
Requisite: Prior coursework in Film and Media Studies. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Johnston.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 485 and FAMS 485.) How do words and images bring each other to life? How have different graphic and material instantiations articulated their separation or union? This seminar will explore the relationship between word and image across different media forms and historical periods, continually asking how they mutually animate, constrain, and give shape to one another. Studying works such as illustrated and graphic novels, theatrical performances, films, and digital works we will attend at once to the intersection between material form and aesthetic experience. Over the course of this seminar we will engage with key concepts and topics including ekphrasis, adaptation, remediation, and synaesthesia while reading theoretical and historical texts by classical and Renaissance authors as well as contemporary critics from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Katherine Hayles. Primary texts may include works by Shakespeare, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Dziga Vertov, W.G. Sebald, William Gibson, and Miranda July. One three-hour class meeting per week.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Bosman and Visiting Professor Johnston.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 486 and FAMS 456.) How can we write histories of media? How are media written about, used, designed, preserved and sometimes discarded? Where are the relics of past media stored and what do these alternative paths not taken and now forgotten futures of media say about different historical moments and the present? This seminar will explore theories and practices of media archaeology and historiography by both examining different scholarly responses to the above questions while also learning about forms of media preservation at various archives throughout the semester. We will move through different historical periods, from the magic lantern performances and phantasmagoria of the eighteenth century through film and the phonograph, and then on to recent digital media and magnetic storage technologies like the floppy disk, hard drive, and personal computer. Throughout the seminar we will continue to ask how media landscapes of the past provide a context for our contemporary engagements with media and also emphasize how the histories we will explore point not only to technological experimentation and change but also to how these media were to engage with the senses of the body. We will read theoretical and historical texts by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jonathan Crary, Lisa Gitelman, Tom Gunning, Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Friedrich Kittler, Vivian Sobchack, Paolo Cherchi Usai and Siegfried Zielinski. One three-hour class meeting and one required screening per week.
Prior coursework in Film and Media Studies is recommended. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Johnston.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent Reading Courses.
Fall and spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023(Offered as ENGL 491 and BLST 461 [CLA].) What would it mean to write in the language in which we dream? A language that we can hear, but cannot (yet) see? Is it possible to conceive a language outside the socio-symbolic order? And can one language subvert the codes and values of another? Questions like these have animated the creolité/nation language debate among Caribbean intellectuals since the mid-1970s, producing some of the most significant francophone and anglophone writing of the twentieth century. This course reads across philosophy, cultural theory, politics, and literature in order to consider the claims such works make for the Creole imagination. We will engage the theoretical and creative work of Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat. We also will consider how these writers transform some of the fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and critical historiography. At stake in our readings will be the various aesthetic and political aspects of postcolonial struggle–how to think outside the colonial architecture of language; how to contest and subvert what remains from history’s violence; and how to evaluate the claims to authenticity of creolized New World cultural forms.
Junior/Senior seminar. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Cobham-Sander and Visiting Professor Drabinski.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2015, Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2023Students intending to continue independent work begun in ENGL 498 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 498. Students beginning a new project who wish to apply for English 499 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.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023How small can drama get while remaining “dramatic”? During the first half of the twentieth century, it was not unusual for a stage in America (or anywhere in the English-speaking world) to be filled with dozens of actors. Over the last sixty years, though, the crowds onstage have thinned. Today, three-, two-, and even one-person plays are as common as twenty-person plays once were.
In this course, we will study plays by American, British, Irish, and South African writers–from Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett to Athol Fugard and Sarah Kane–who have found new inspiration within these tight constraints. In doing so, we will not only closely analyze dramatic texts, we will also look through those texts to imagine how they might shape our sense of space, sound, movement and image in the theater. Plays, after all–from the most “realist” to the most avant-garde–both reflect reality and compress or distort it in beautiful and strategic ways. We will also pay particular attention to the way in which drama creates and deploys character differently than novels or poems do.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Grobe.
2023-24: Not offeredPoetry is not merely a written form; it is an oral art and a prompt to performance. Students in this course will learn to use “close listening,” as well as the embodied experience of performing poetry themselves, in order to access poetic meanings that are unavailable through silent reading alone. This course will require both written analyses and performed repertoires of poetry. No prior performance experience is required.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Grobe.
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.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025An 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.
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 semester: Professor Bashford. Spring semester: Professor Lobdell.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025The 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)
Omitted 2012-13.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Spring semester. Professor Wagner.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018The study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Fall semester. Professor Matteson.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will include technical investigations of weight sharing, body-part manipulations, off-balance support, lifting and being lifted, negative space, resistance, and various ways of harnessing forces of momentum. How can we move with confidence, spatial awareness, and fearless agency when in close proximity and in contact with other bodies? Duets, trios, and groups will be challenged to kinetically build set partner dances with repeated opportunities in the last part of class to perform, often with the added challenge of speeding up.
The repertory portion will draw from the material generated in class to create a larger piece, with final performances near the end of the semester in Holden Theater. There will be one weekly rehearsal (Friday 4-5:30) as a full group and TBA individual rehearsals to build solo material. Several rehearsals will also be added close to the performance date.
Spring semester. Five College Professor Matteson.
2023-24: Not offeredTechnical investigations of weight sharing, body-part manipulations, off-balance support, lifting and being lifted, negative space, resistance, and various ways of harnessing forces of momentum. How can we move with confidence, spatial awareness, and fearless agency when in close proximity and in contact with other bodies? Duets, trios, and groups will be challenged to kinetically build set partner dances with repeated opportunities in the last part of class to perform, often with the added challenge of speeding up.
Spring semester. Five College Professor Matteson.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Omitted 2012-13.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Omitted 2012-13.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024The study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Omitted 2012-13. Guest artist TBA.
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 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. Only 20 students who attend the first class will be admitted based on class and major.
Fall semester. Professor Bashford.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024The 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.
Fall semester. Five College Lecturer Sylla.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course examines key ways by which theater and performance have contributed to enrich processes of social transformation within specific socio-political contexts throughout the Americas. Students will study exemplar cases in which theater and performance have participated in and affected the political life of countries and communities, trying to raise public awareness about issues such as state violence and trauma, memory, migration and globalization, indigenousness, neoliberalism, gender and the right of citizenship. In addition, students will acquire understanding about the practice and aesthetic of professional art works and grass root and community-based theaters that are fundamental to the practice of civic engagement. The course is designed to build a more contemporaneous and nuanced understanding of the meaning and implications of engaging in the practice of theater and performance for social change in the Americas.
Spring semester. Five College Fellow Barriga.
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 exercises in analytical and descriptive writing, students undertake experiential projects that explore 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 Euripides, Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, Weiss, Pinter and Kane among others.
Omitted 2012-13. 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.
Omitted 2012-13.
2023-24: Not offeredSpring Semester. Guest Artist TBA.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will include studio sessions in contemporary modern/jazz dance technique at the intermediate/advanced 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. Professor Matteson.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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 intermediate/advanced level. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Fall semester. Professor Matteson.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. 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 intermediate/advanced level. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Spring semester. Professor Vacanti.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this second course in the craft of speaking, students learn to shape and speak text to powerful effect. Students build on prior work to extend vocal range and capacity while learning component principles of spoken expression. Articulation, inflection, methods of contrast and interpretation, tone, verbal imaging and aural structures of poetry and rhetoric are practiced in a studio setting. Emphasis is placed on personal engagement and presence to others while speaking. Assignments in text scoring and memorization support class work. The course culminates in a public presentation of student work. Three class meetings per week.
Requisite: THDA 125H. Spring semester. Professor Bashford.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as THDA 228 and WAGS 228.) The Women’s Liberation Movement dramatically affected the American social and intellectual climate of the 1970s. In art, as in education, medicine, and politics, women sought equality and economic parity as they actively fought against the mainstream values that had been used to exclude them. Performance art proved to be an ideal match for the feminist agenda--it was personal, immediate, and highly effective in communicating an alternate view of power in the world. Artists explored autobiography, the female body, myth, and politics, and played a crucial role in developing and expanding the very nature of performance, consciously uniting the agendas of social politics with art. This class will take us from Yoko Ono’s performances of "Cut Piece" and the Judson Dance Theater's proto-feminist experiments of the 1960s to the radical guerilla-style performances of the 1970s and beyond, where the body was the contested site for debates about the nature of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. We will be looking at works that were not polite demands for legislative change, but raw and sloppy theatrical displays and ecstatic bonding experiences that managed to be at once satirical and celebratory, alienating and illuminating.
Fall semester. Five College Dance Professor Valis-Hill.
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: THDA 113. Omitted 2012-13. Resident Artist Lobdell.
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. 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, Shakespeare, Molière, Chekov, Williams, Shepherd, Kushner, Kane and McDonagh. The course culminates in a group directed ensemble piece. Throughout, students engage in reflective writing and practical research assignments, and manage class work with peers to achieve mutual rehearsal goals. Class meetings include discussion of theoretical readings and play texts. Two meetings per week. Students should expect to schedule significant outside rehearsal time.
Requisites: One of the following--THDA 111, 112 or 113, or equivalent college-level experience with consent of the instructor. Omitted 2012-13 Professor Bashford.
(Offered as THDA 250 and FAMS 341.) This 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 2012-13.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2017, Fall 2023This 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.
Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredWhat is the role of sound in live performance, and how is it designed and produced? This course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of sound design in live performance contexts from both technical and artistic perspectives. Students will explore the fundamentals of audio production and acoustics through a series of short projects, covering a range of topics from using various sound-editing software applications, including ProTools, Logic and other DAW platforms, to live sound reinforcement principles. Special consideration will be given to software environments (QLab) dedicated to live playback and design of acoustic spaces, and we will examine strategies for developing an efficient, real-world approach to the technical rehearsal process. Throughout the course, we will consider interpretive skills needed for imagining sound design opportunities in various script, dance, and performance-oriented collaborations. The course will culminate in a final project that integrates technical and artistic problem-solving skills related to creating sound for a live performance.
Requisite: One prior practice-of-arts course in theater and dance, music or studio art, or equivalent experience. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Robinson.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2023An 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: THDA 112 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students. Fall semester. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to the theory and techniques of theatrical lighting, with emphasis on the aesthetic and practical aspects of the field as well as the principles of light and color.
Requisite: THDA 112 or consent of the instructor. Lab work in lighting technology. Spring semester. Resident Lighting Designer Couch.
2023-24: Not offeredThe materials, techniques and concepts which underlie the design and creation of the theatrical environment.
Requisite: THDA 112 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students. Spring semester. Professor Dougan.
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 offeredAn 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: THDA 113 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 16 students. Spring semester. Resident Artist Lobdell.
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: One of the following--THDA 240, 242, 252 or equivalent college-level experience with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Bashford.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as THDA 352, FAMS 342 and MUSI 352.) The focus of this studio course will be to create performances, events, happenings and installations in multiple locations both on and off campus. This course is especially designed for students in dance, theater, film/video, art, music and creative writing who want to explore the challenges and potentials in creating performances outside of traditional "frames" or venues (e.g., the theater, the gallery, the lecture hall, etc.). At the center of our inquiry will be questions of space, place and community. In the first few weeks of the semester we will tour different sites and research multiple historical and contemporary examples of site-specific performances and artists across media. We will then select different sites--based on student interest and location access--and spend the rest of the semester creating events/performances on site. Students will work in collaborative teams to create these performances for these places. Interaction with communities at these sites will also be explored, connecting the artistic work to community engagement and raising awareness of the issues and ethics involved in site-specific performance. These projects will be performed in process and at the end of the semester in a three-day festival. Different guest artists in dance, theater, art, sound and political activism will join the class and work with designated groups.
Class meeting Fridays 1-4; outside rehearsal/lab sessions TBA
Requisite: Previous experience in improvisation and/or composition in dance, theater, performance, film/video, music/sound, installation, creative writing, and/or design is required. Spring semester. Professor Woodson with Guest Artists.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 353 and FAMS 345.) An 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: THDA 252 or the equivalent and consent of the instructor. Fall semester. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredAn 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: THDA 260, 261, 263 or consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is a continuation of THDA 360, 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: THDA 260, 261, or 263 or consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Dougan.
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: THDA 270 or the equivalent. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 10 students. Fall semester. Playwright-in-Residence Congdon.
2023-24: Not offeredA theoretical and practical consideration of the process by which the performance-maker’s initial idea is altered, adapted, developed, rehearsed and finally transmitted to the audience through the medium of theatrical productions.
Omitted 2012-13. Professor Woodson.
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. A half course.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025Independent Reading Course. Full course.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025For Honors candidates in Theater and Dance.
Open to seniors. Spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2024In this course, students conduct a semester-long rehearsal investigation into the work of a particular playwright, and explore ways in which coordinated action renders distinctive writing in theatrical form. We will examine selected plays, background material, and study
theatrical conventions related to the selected playwright, and we will practice ensemble techniques of close textual investigation, acting and staging. Emphasis is placed on the means and practical advantages of developing a shared vision, and on the analytical and performative ways of communicating required to do so. While primarily geared toward students interested in acting and directing, the course is designed to develop a collaborative model of the functions of acting, directing, designing and dramaturgy. All students should expect to act, co-direct, conduct research, and explore basic design implications together. The course will culminate in a workshop-style performance. This course may be repeated once when the playwright/topic is different. The chosen playwright for fall of 2012 is Molière.
Requisite: A prior course in THDA or permission of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Bashford.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 280 and MUSI 260.) Conducted as a collaborative workshop among student writers and composers, this course explores the close relationship between words and music. While working together on new music/text pieces for the stage, we will seek to arrive at various definitions of "music theater." In addition to ongoing creative assignments, we will examine existing works in various genres, including songs, musical theater, opera and other experimental forms. Featured writers and composers will include Brecht and Weill, Auden/Kallman and Stravinsky, Sondheim and Bernstein, and Goodman and Adams, among others. Although students with varied experience in musical composition and/or creative writing will be admitted, all students should expect both to write text, to compose music and to work together doing so. Regular class meetings will be supplemented by individual tutorials. The course will culminate in a public performance of final projects created in collaboration with other students.
Admission with consent of the instructors. Limited to 16 students. Spring semester. Professor Bashford and Visiting Professor Meltzer.
2023-24: Not offered