The following Liberal Arts courses are available for Fall 2012 registration. Learn about the rest of our Fall 2012 electives here, or find a complete list of courses offered in other years here.
The Theatre of the Absurd
This course examines the innovative style of the Theatre of the Absurd, the culmination of the 20th century modernist eruption in European theatre and an influence on the non-tonal languages of composers such as Feldman, Berio, and Glass. We will explore the Theatre of the Absurd's origins in mime and the silent films of Charlie Chaplin; verbal nonsense and the films of the Marx Brothers; the literature of surrealism, dream, and nightmare and the works of Franz Kafka; the Existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartres; and the theatrical theories of Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht. Students will study the context, content, and structure of plays by Ionesco, Pinter, and Beckett and will have the opportunity to compose and perform original musical interpretations of these plays in collaboration with the Music Theory course, Order and Chaos in Music since 1945.
taught by Patrick Keppel
Transcendence and Entrapment: 19th Century American Literature
Nineteenth-century American writers repeatedly reflect on themes of transcendence—of literary conventions, of cultural norms and codes, of the individual self, of geographical constraints, or of material culture in a realm of nature or spirit. At the same time, they detail the entrapments of slavery, reservation lands, cities, mass culture, human nature, socially enforced constructions of identity, and the human mind. This introduction to nineteenth-century American literature explores the tensions of transcendence and entrapment, among other themes, in stories, poems, personal narratives, and essays by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Apess, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mark Twain. Students will have the opportunity to explore the places Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts lived and wrote on a field trip to Concord and Walden Pond.
taught by Jill Gatlin
Film Studies II
[Prerequisite: Film Studies I or familiarity with scene analysis, e.g. types of shots] This course will continue the focus on the visual elements of film. As with Film I, we will examine narrative films, but will also include documentaries, animation, and experimental films with no apparent narrative structure.
taught by Gretchen Breese
2012-03-13
MILES DAVIS