The following Liberal Arts courses are available for Spring 2012 registration. Learn about the rest of our Spring 2012 electives here, or find a complete list of courses offered in other years here.
BioCultures: Nature, Gender, and Sexuality
Note: This elective is being taught in collaboration with Ruth Lepson’s elective, Contemporary American Poetry. Ask your advisor for more information. This course examines three recent trends in Cultural Studies: Green Cultural Studies, Gender Theory, and Queer Theory. These fields investigate what is “natural” and what is socially constructed about nature, gender, and sexuality, respectively, working toward more complex understandings of binaries including nature/culture, nature/nurture, and the biological/cultural. In addition to asking what nature, gender, and sexuality are, we will explore what they mean in contemporary culture. How do our understandings of these terms affect our interactions with human and nonhuman others; our social structures and ecological values; and our sense of identity, performance of identity, and self-expression? What does it mean to live in an era of ecological crisis, gender-bending, and polarized public discourse on sexuality? What are the implications of the ways we represent nature, gender, and sexuality in the arts and popular culture?
taught by Jill Gatlin
Contemporary American Poetry
Note: This elective is being taught in collaboration with Jill Gatlin's elective, BioCultures. Ask your advisor for more information. In this course we will look at some recent trends in American poetry: Ecopoetry, which focuses on the relationship between language and the environment and ways in which poetry might affect the discussions of climate change and bioregionalism, and innovative women’s poetry and queer theory that are influencing the ways we look at language. We will briefly discuss conceptual poetry, which is diametrically opposed to these other poetries and which goes beyond the influential Language poetry of the last 30 years to a more theory-driven use of language and text. With Jill Gatlin’s BioCultures class, we will also take a field trip to Gloucester, MA, to meet with people who knew the influential innovative poet Charles Olson, who wrote the epic The Maximus Poems, one of the first poems with an awareness of the landscape and a very specific sense of place.
taught by Ruth Lepson / offered every spring semester
Modernism
“Make it new!” demanded modernist poet Ezra Pound. Responding to shattered truths, fractured moral standards, shifting social norms, and rapid technological changes, modernists endeavored not only to record cultural change but also to make a stylistic break from the past. This interdisciplinary course will focus on the “new” literary styles and statements of modernist writers. Students will study not only “high modernism” but also the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian movement. To contextualize and enrich our literary explorations, we will simultaneously study modernist innovations in music, the visual arts, and intellectual thought.
taught by Jill Gatlin
Food for Thought: Representations of Food in Literature & Culture
This course examines the artistic, cultural, personal, and political significance of food on local and global scales. Through literature, critical essays, films, and personal observations, students will explore a menu of topics including: food as artistic inspiration; as entertainment, nourishment, and tradition; as object of desire and abhorrence; as tool of seduction and resistance; and as focal point in debates about health, disease, hunger, consumer culture, gender, race, class, nationality, colonization, social justice, genetic modification, and environmental degradation.
taught by Jill Gatlin
Film Studies I
We will look at some of the principal developments in narrative films and give particular attention to how the visual elements work together to convey meaning and create their overall effect. How do lighting, camera angle, and frame composition work together? How does the rhythm of a scene shape our experience and expectations? This course explores ways of seeing and forms of representation in film, examines the viewer’s engagement in the visual image and narrative, and establishes critical perspectives for viewing films.
taught by Gretchen Breese
2011-10-03
CHARLES IVES