Taught by a working professional actor/director, this introduction to acting will lead the beginning student through the artistic process involved in acting for the stage and other media. Through exercises, study of technique, scene work and improvisation, the student will work to develop natural abilities and will become familiar with the working language and tools of the modern actor. Emphasis in this class will be on the physical self, mental preparation, the imagination, and discipline. Written work will include keeping a journal and writing a character analysis. Perfect attendance in this course is vital and mandatory.

Open to sophomore and above.

While the writing of fiction involves only the writer and the page, the group workshop affords the writer the opportunity to explore, develop and refine his or her work in a small community focused on a single goal. This environment of craft and creativity is particularly critical to the beginning writer. As with any craft, revision is the key to effective storytelling. The revision process will be emphasized. Short fiction by leading writers will be read and discussed; elements of craft will be explored; students will learn to deliver criticism in a supportive, constructive way; but learning by doing will comprise the majority of the class. Writing will begin in the first class, leading to small, peer-driven workshop groups and culminating in a full class workshop at semester's end. Students will produce three stories throughout the semester, all of which will be workshopped and revised. The student's engagement in the course, participation and attendance, will drive the final grades.

Open to sophomore and above.

The Beginning Poetry Workshop is an elective course introducing students to the art of poetry writing. The course sequentially addresses major commitments of poetry including form/content, sound, line, voice, image, language(s), tradition/convention, experiment, audience, revision, performance, collection, publication, and distribution. Workshop is the heart of the course, animating the practice, discourse, critique, audience, community, and mentorship vital to poets. Every class will also include close reading, discussion of assigned texts, and writing. We will attend public readings, curate and participate in community readings, and welcome poets to our class, when possible. Work can be developed in a range of styles, traditions, and languages. You will leave this class with a collection of workshopped and revised poems, which you will design, self-publish, and distribute in print and/or digital form.

The Beginning Poetry Workshop is a prerequisite for the LAS-E421 Advanced Poetry Workshop in the Spring.

Open to sophomore and above.

This course will explore Chinese Cinema as a national cinema and as a transnational cinema in both its popular and classic forms; however, the term 'Chinese' has been and is still a debated term among the very populations that lay claim to it, i.e., mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Chinese diaspora, the People's Republic. These debates make the study of Chinese film a study of how to categorize or know film itself. In other words, exploring Chinese film in a Western critical arena within the hegemony of Western film studies begs theoretical questions about the very dominant and commonplace terms and perspectives used to examine all film in the 21st century, i.e, What are these films showing us? What are we looking for? What do we see? Investigating these theoretical quandaries will also be a part of this course. We will survey representative films produced before 1949, during the shift from of the cultural capital from Yan'an to Shanghai 1950-1964, during the Cultural Revolution (1964-1986), and during its emergence as the premier transnational cinema (late-1980s to 2000s). We will also consider the particular film genres and film schools of Chinese cinema. Students will be responsible for reading critical and theoretical essays, viewing all required films, writing analytical papers on assigned topics, and presenting one oral sequence analysis.

Digital technologies have shaped contemporary media and culture in profound ways, including how we make, experience, and talk about art, design, commerce, and culture, bodies, identities, and communities, privacy, security, and war, time, space, and geography, and even the politics of meaning and "truth" themselves. In this course, we will look specifically to late 20th and early 21st century cinema -- ostensibly now an "old" medium -- to help us understand (and sometimes productively misunderstand) new media. What is new media and what can cinema specifically tell us about it? What has become of cinema, both culturally and structurally, under the digital? How has cinema historically represented new or emergent media technologies? How have forms of vision and perception that have emerged or intensified alongside new media -- satellites, drones, surveillance, smart phones, etc. -- troubled cinema on formal, stylistic, and epistemological levels? What kinds of new or transformative potential has new media unearthed for future cinemas? Through readings of contemporary media studies scholarship, weekly film screenings, and student presentations, we will take up these and related questions.

Open to sophomore and above.

A Collaborative Study Project (CSP) allows two students to work collaboratively to complete a faculty supervised project of independent study.

Usually, a CSP is supervised by two faculty members, but with approval it may be supervised by one faculty member. Its purpose is to meet individual student needs by providing an alternative to regularly offered courses, though it is not a substitute for a course if that course is regularly offered.

This course will introduce students to the vast, variegated field of critical theory. We will study the concepts, questions, and debates that have been central to understandings of modern culture. In order to do so, we will explore key contributions in psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism and ideology critique, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonial studies. As we explore this wide range of approaches, we will interrogate how thinkers have imagined and reimagined terms like "art," "reading," "subjectivity," "modern," "discipline," "culture," "power," "technology," "sovereignty" and "nature," among others. And as we build this critical lexicon, we will examine the social institutions and intellectual formations that shape each debate. What kinds of knowledge does critical theory produce, and what are their blindspots? What forms of personhood and community do these theories outline, and in whose interests? What kinds of insights become visible when we examine conflicting theories together? Thinkers include Adorno, Agamben, Althusser, Barthes, Benjamin, Benveniste, Bhabha, Butler, Chow, Derrida, Fanon, Foucault, Freud, Gramsci, Hall, Haraway, Irigaray, Jameson, Lacan, Latour, Levi-Strauss, Lukacs, Marx, Ranciere, Said, Saussure, Spivak, Terranova, Willliams, and others.

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments.

Required for graduation for all undergraduates, including transfers. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

For the Fall semester, freshmen are pre-registered into this course.

Please contact the department concerning any registration questions.

The Independent Study Project (ISP) allows students to supplement the established curriculum by completing a faculty supervised project for credit in a specific area of interest. Its purpose is to meet individual student needs by providing an alternative to regularly offered courses.

Permission of Instructor and GPA of 3.0 or higher is required.

Register by completing the Independent Study Application available on the Registrar's website; the course is not available via web registration.

This course registers an outgoing exchange student into a pre-approved LAS course which is taken at the exchange school. Successful completion of the course will result in a "T" grade once receipt of the official transcript from the partner school has arrived at Registrar's Office.

This discussion-based course surveys major and minor works of British literature, mostly poetry, from the late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, with emphasis on the way these works relate to broad cultural phenomena in other areas, including philosophy, theology, and visual arts. Regular homework emphasizes independent critical and investigative reading of complex texts and images; formal writing assignments develop your ability to combine your own insights with those gained from casual and scholarly research, open-book midterm and final exams allow you to demonstrate your ability to analyze unfamiliar works and place them in context with those we have studied. Readings include (mostly short) works by Chaucer (3 Canterbury Tales), Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare (Sonnets andThe Tempest ), Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Herrick, Milton, Bunyan, Butler, Behn, Rochester, Locke, Dryden, Pope, Hogarth, Gray, Boswell and Johnson.

A workshop-style course which combines English with a studio project for students with an interest in children's picture books. Students will learn to develop storytelling skills (imagination, language, plot, character, and voice) and illustration techniques (characterization, setting, page, layout) by studying picture books and completing writing and illustration assignments. For their final projects, students will be expected to produce an original text, sketch dummy, and two to four finished pieces of art. The class will also include an overview of publishing procedures and published writers/illustrators will be invited to share their experiences and critique students' work.

Students must plan and register for both LAS-E416 and ILLUS-3612 and will receive 3 studio credits and 3 liberal arts credits.

Postcolonial literature is the writing produced by people in or from regions that have escaped the yoke of colonialism. Of course, such a definition raises a number of questions, and during the semester we will grapple with the definition. Our readings will open with several theoretical discussions of postcoloniality, then we will continue with novels and poetry from Australia, India, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Samoa, and Sri Lanka. This history of trading empires and settler colonies will be a major focus in this course. Through individual projects and a final paper that works with at least one of the theoretical texts and a novel or book of poetry, students can begin to focus on the area in the field that specifically interests them. Writers may include Ciaran Carson, Lionel Fogarty, Keri Hulme, R.K. Narayan, Michael Ondaatje, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Albert Wendt.

The professional Internship provides valuable exposure to a professional setting, enabling students to better establish a career path and define practical aspirations. Internship proposals are carefully vetted to determine legitimacy and must meet the contact hour requirements listed in the RISD Course Announcement.

Fascism got you down? Tired of endless war? Wondering how art could possibly stand up to--let alone subvert--the predations of big-time capitalism and its police state? Unfortunately, these are not new questions. Fortunately, they were taken on directly by two of the twentieth century's most provocative theatrical innovators. Bertolt Brecht (German, 1898-1956) and Dario Fo (Italian, 1926-2016) were both theorists and practitioners who saw the theater as a platform for arts activism. Drawing on popular, traditional forms, which they deployed in response to the acute crises of their times, Brecht and Fo broke and then rewrote the theatrical rulebook for our epoch, drawing condemnation and censorship from official institutions, but profound praise from audiences the world over. Students in this course will read exemplary works (e.g., Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, Galileo, St. Joan of the Stockyards; Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Mistero Buffo, Can't Pay? Won't Pay!) before concluding the term by examining their legacies among playwrights as diverse as David Hare, Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Alecky Blythe, Lynn Nottage, Augusto Boal and Mark Ravenhill.

This course examines the way in which dominant movements within Anglo-American modernist literature between 1890 and 1960 reflect artists' attempts to reimagine the world around them and humanity's place within it, including such stylistic developments as imagism and expressionism. The transformation of traditional genres and styles which characterizes the period is famously encapsulated by poet Ezra Pound's declaration that artists of all kinds must "Make It New." Focusing on both literal and figurative ex-patriot authors of the United States and United Kingdom, students can expect to read the novels and poetry of such authors as Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf --authors whose writings exemplify some of the most radical experimentations of the modernist period.

The LAS Open Seminar is devoted to the development of undergraduate and graduate degree projects that engage the discipline of literary arts and studies, and involves the writing of a longer, research-based project (thesis, artist's statement, creative work, etc). This engagement may take a variety of different forms, including a direct referencing or interaction with literary texts or issues; a focus on textuality and/or narrativity; a concern with research and the mechanics of writing a longer project. Therefore, as the course title indicates, the seminar has an open structure to accommodate our ability to address and foster each student's interests and concerns. As the semester progresses, we will move from a discussion of texts that introduce key concepts in the framing of interdisciplinary projects to group analyses and the workshopping of each student's project. In the first part of the semester, we will discuss a number of conceptual tenets that will ground our theorization of the artistic process, including issues of intentionality and audience; issues of translation and interdisciplinarity; and the relation of form to content. The second part of the semester will be organized and driven by group analyses of the degree and related written project of each class member.

Open to juniors, seniors, 5th-years and graduate students.

This seminar explores roles women have played in wars for independence and democracy across the Global South. As the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo depicts in his iconic film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), some women fought alongside men carrying bombs in the fight for freedom from French imperialism in Algeria. However, more often, women have forged their own paths parallel to men enacting complex forms of resistance through art, mobilizing domesticity, and protest. Using women's participation in Algerian independence in the 1950s as our starting point, we will engage with women who resist the reductive fantasy of the bomb-carrying female freedom fighter throughout world. Figures under our investigative lens will include Assia Djebar who illustrates women playing new roles outside of the home in Algeria; women who led the peacemaking process in Liberia to bring Africa's first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to power; and Lina Ben Mhenni who used social media in Tunisia to show the world injustice taking place under a repressive regime in 2010. Alongside these memoirs, literary texts, historical documents, and films by and about women at war, we will develop a critical vocabulary of women at work reading theorists that include Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and Judith Butler. Over the course of the semester, we will put these voices in conversation with one another in order to reconstruct alternative histories of resisting oppression in the Global South and beyond.

Open to sophomore and above.

Landscapes function as apocalyptic, political, urban, imaginary, and nostalgic sites of great significance in fiction and film. Films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, Take Shelter, and Melancholia illustrate the environment's profound role in recent apocalyptic narratives. Cormac McCarthy's fiction in general, and the Coen Brothers' interpretation of No Country for Old Men in particular, place human violence in harsh, brutal, and ancient settings. Bodies of land are divided, raped, ruined, and transformed from gardens into wastelands of abandoned machinery and landmines--as in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown or Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly. The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng, like Amy Waldman's The Submission, places a garden at the center of the novel and its meaning. Other titles which provide an illustration of the course material include Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Krakauer and Penn's Into the Wild, Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, Josh Fox's documentary Gasland, Wes Anderson's nostalgic landscape in Moonrise Kingdom, and imaginary places in films like After Life (Kore-eda Hirokazu), Micmacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet), and Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg). Titles will change each semester. Weekly writing assignments in response to the reading and films are required.

This course introduces students to sound poetry traditions including early 20th century European and Russian avant-gardes; mid-to late 20th century North American experimentation; and contemporary performance across a range of cultures, languages, and media. We will also study specific styles, phenomena, and movements, e.g., scat, silbo gomero, and hip hop, and students will be invited to present and work with examples from cultural and language traditions in which they are interested. Particular attention will be paid to contemporary practitioners, and to relationships between material traditions of poetry including sound, visual, and digital. Students will build knowledge of coordinated examples of sound poetry; compose and perform sound poems; and write and present a research paper. Texts may include Anne Carson, "The Gender of Sound," Jay-Z, Decoded, Christian Bök, Eunoia, Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin's The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, and the archive ubuweb.

This course explores the relationship between narrative and national constructions in the literature and film produced by a variety of American authors during the 20th and 21st centuries. We will analyze texts from various authors in light of shifting paradigms in American thought, politics, and expressive culture. Our primary investigation is twofold: (1) to understand pervasive themes in U.S. literature, including the in/commensurability of American democracy and its continued exclusionism, (2) to become conversant with theories of nationalism, sexuality, gender, race and class. As we pursue our inquiry, we will examine the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors that have created and shaped the narratives of Americans of different "backgrounds."

What is political about theatre and performance and when does politics become theatrical? What are some of the assumptions and desires that animate the relationship between theatre, performance, and politics? How has this relationship been practiced, understood and theorized over time, and most importantly, in contemporary circumstances? What relationship does political theatre have with the local, the national and the transnational? This course seeks to approach these questions through readings that may include works by Sophocles, Brecht, Heaney, Boal, Friel, Churchill, Edgar, Tendulkar, Soyinka, Fusco, Deavere Smith, Pinter and Nottage along with relevant theoretical texts. Screenings might include videos related to recent US presidential elections, musical and artistic performances, and acts of contemporary culture jamming activists like "The Yes Men."

What does it mean to be a "thing"? What does it feel like to be a "thing"? We all feel that we know how it feels to be "human": we are not "things," or "inanimate objects." But what we don't often question is the emotional and social valuations put upon the relationship between humans and things. For most of us, to be treated "as a thing" is to be de-humanized, de-valued, the nadir of existence. This course will question that binaristic tradition of conceptualizing objects through the lens of femininity. Cross-culturally but especially within the Western-European world, women have been treated as "things": toys, trophies, dolls, ornaments, are all metonyms for "female." By studying literary and cultural texts as well as art produced by women and women-identified authors, we will rigorously and critically examine the multiple functions, oppressive and subversive, of the linkages between "woman" and "thing," and in turn, re-think the idea of the object.

In this course, we will discuss how comics and other forms of literary-visual art illuminate various environmental concepts. Environmental problems are caused not merely by technological expansion or political negligence. They also result from, and persist as, problems of representation. An environmental crisis is a cultural crisis. Beginning from this position, we will consider comics art as a unique medium for telling stories about how humans and other animals relate to their environments, focusing especially on the form's capacity for representing time, space, word, and image in sequence. To further enrich our understanding of the cultural values and concepts that undergird the environmental decisions individuals, communities, and institutions make every day, we will examine how environmental problems intersect with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. As astute environmental critics, we will dismantle the experience of reading comics, and the craft of making them, through frequent in-class discussions, creative projects, and a series of analytical assignments in both written and comics form. These assignments will help us come to understand comics art as a medium for both creative and critical invention. Throughout the semester, we will read comics in various formats and genres, including (but not limited to) graphic novels, comic strips, serialized comic books, zines, web comics, illustrated journals, manga, memoir, biography, fiction, and journalism.

Open to sophomore and above.

In this course students will explore the artistic, cultural, economic, and scientific role of biodiversity in today's society. Using Guyana, a biodiverse English-speaking Caribbean nation, located along the northeastern coastline of South America as an example, students will approach the topic of biodiversity from multiple perspectives including the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and visual arts. More specifically, this course offers RISD students the opportunity to visit a biological hotspot and consider its role in society; participate in conservation science field research; interact cross-culturally; and develop their communication skills. Taught collaboratively, this course emphasizes the importance of connecting ideas, information, and methodologies across the arts, humanities, and sciences, with an emphasis on biology.

This is a co-requisite course. Students must also take both LAS-W717. Students will receive 6 liberal arts credits as identified by each subject.

Registration begins in October at a time to be announced.

All students are required to remain in good academic standing in order to participate in the WS travel course/studio. Failure to remain in good academic standing can lead to removal from the course, either before or during the course. Also in cases where WS travel courses and studios do not reach student capacity, the course may be cancelled after the last day of Wintersession travel course registration. As such, all students are advised not to purchase flights for participation in Wintersession travel courses until the course is confirmed to run, which happens within the week after the final Wintersession travel course registration period.

Permission of Instructor required.

Open to first year students with approval from the Dean of Experimental & Foundation Studies.

2019WS Travel Cost: $4,225.00 - airfare included.

***Off-Campus Study***

Vedi Napoli e poi muori ("See Naples and then die") was a common expression, echoed most famously on his grand tour by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to identify Naples as the most naturally and artistically beautiful city in the world; so beautiful that one needn't look upon anything else after seeing it. Few cities embody the Empedoclean elementality of Naples: situated in a volcanic landscape dominated by Mount Vesuvius, beside an enormous bay and natural harbor that opens onto the Tyrrhenian Sea under an endless sky, it marks a dramatic convergence of earth, wind, water and fire. The art, literature, history, politics and economics of Naples are equally "elemental" in the way that their constitutive and conflicting cultural forces are manifest in a dynamic, frequently paradoxical system of social relations.

Students will engage this compelling city and its environment through the twinned graphic practices of drawing and writing, with particular attention given to the mediums of panoramic landscape, scientific illustration, philosophical speculation and fictional narrative. The LAS component of the course will survey literary discourses from antiquity to the present that imagine Naples and its environment. Readings (in English translation) will consist of selections by Virgil, Pliny (Elder and Younger), Livy, Tomasso Campanella, Giambattista Vico, Giacomo Leopardi, Matilde Serao and Walter Benjamin. The primary texts around which the course will be built are Susan Sontag's Volcano Lover, Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, and contemporary Neapolitan noir fiction. Students will have read and written on Volcano Lover before convening in Naples, after which work will commence on a term project produced in tandem with travel and studio projects.

This is a co-requisite course. Students must plan and register for LAS-W725 and LDAR-W625. Students will receive 3 studio credits and 3 liberal arts credits.

Registration begins in October at a time to be announced.

All students are required to remain in good academic standing in order to participate in the WS travel course/studio. A minimum GPA of 2.5 is required. Failure to remain in good academic standing can lead to removal from the course, either before or during the course. Also in cases where WS travel courses and studios do not reach student capacity, the course may be cancelled after the last day of Wintersession travel course registration. As such, all students are advised not to purchase flights for participation in Wintersession travel courses until the course is confirmed to run, which happens within the week after the final Wintersession travel course registration period.

Permission of Instructor required.

Open to first year students with approval from the Dean of Experimental & Foundation Studies.

2019WS Travel Cost: $2,630.00 - airfare not included.

***Off-Campus Study***

Located on the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal contains a wide range of socio-ecological regions and configurations, including large cityscapes, western and southern Atlantic coasts, mountainous regions, agricultural landscapes, marine ecologies, petrocultural landscapes, and tourist infrastructures. In addition to these complexly-layered contemporary socio-ecologies, Portugal has many richly-layered built environments, with cultural heritage sites dating from the pre-historic to the contemporary. Portugal's historical and contemporary socio-ecologies emerge from both historical and contemporary geopolitics, but also, at least in part, from its varied geological contexts. Students in the co-requisite, integrated liberal arts and studio courses that comprise "Mapping Portugal: Bio-Geo-Cultural Heritages" will spend four weeks in Portugal and will use the methodologies of design for the built environment, the fine arts, the environmental humanities, mapping, and writing to investigate overlapping networks of biological, geological, and cultural heritage in Portugal, with a focus on the Alentejo and Algarve regions. The course begins and ends in Lisbon, but focuses primarily on sites to the south and east of Lisbon around four three different bases: Setubal/Sines/Alcácer do Sal, Évora, Mértola /Serpa, and Faro. By staying for extended periods in each of these areas, students will be able to focus their studies on the specific socio-ecologies and heritage sites surrounding each base. By the course end, students will be able to link them together into a comprehensive understanding of the bio-geo-cultural heritages and networks of the Alentejo and Algarve.

This is a co-requisite course. Students must plan and register for LAEL-W512 and INTAR-1512. Students will receive 3 studio credits and 3 liberal arts credits.

Registration begins in October at a time to be announced.

All students are required to remain in good academic standing in order to participate in the WS travel course/studio. A minimum GPA of 2.50 is required. Failure to remain in good academic standing can lead to removal from the course, either before or during the course. Also in cases where WS travel courses and studios do not reach student capacity, the course may be cancelled after the last day of Wintersession travel course registration. As such, all students are advised not to purchase flights for participation in Wintersession travel courses until the course is confirmed to run, which happens within the week after the final Wintersession travel course registration period.

Permission of Instructor required.

Open to first year students with approval from the Dean of Experimental & Foundation Studies.

Estimated Materials Cost: $100.00

2019WS Travel Cost: $3,900.00 - airfare not included.

***Off-Campus Study***

In this course, we will be looking at various displays of the human body, focusing on four main arenas: the freak show, the minstrel show, the drag show, and the human zoo. We will focus extensively on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the heyday of human exhibitions, and move forward to current modes of display, which both contest and refigure earlier spectacles. Texts will include theoretical readings, films, novels, audio recordings, handbills, stereocard slides, postcards and advertisements. Students will be writing frequent response essays, and will produce a presentation--both written and oral-- on one particular aspect/enactment of corporeal display. There will also be a final project which will involve students constructing their own displays.

This course focuses on the intersectionalities of race and queer subjectivities in queer cinema. We will trace this development from the historical cinematic 1990s of New Queer Cinema (NQC), an era that encompasses an explosion of "gay film visibility," to an exploration of present day queer cinema and the ways in which queer representations and queer identities are portrayed. We will study the stylistic developments and controversies of queer film, examining major innovations and changes as compared to films from the NQC era. Such questions as what's at stake in films that contest and re-imagine new queer subjectivities will be addressed during the course.

This Liberal Arts Elective is a hands-on investigation of the development of Latin handwritten letters from about 200 BCE to about 1500 CE, analyzing scripts and script families from Roman cursive and monumental letters to the Renaissance letters that were the basis of most modern fonts. The emphasis of the course is on dynamic analysis of letters as written rather than static forms, though we will also explore the implications of the Platonic and later organic/evolutionary models that are the traditional means for understanding the history of letterforms. Students will master a basic Italic hand; study and write versions of a dozen or more historical scripts originally executed with styli, brushes, and reed, quill, and metal pens; make pens from river reeds and other materials (and write with them); and investigate the properties of papyrus, wood, vellum, and paper as writing surfaces. The class will visit at least one museum, spend extensive time outside of class practicing letters, and write two papers involving the historical contexts, paleographic characteristics, and calligraphic/graphic procedures for particular handwritten manuscripts. Although all the scripts studied were originally written right-handed, left-handed students have excelled in the course.

The Pond Street Project course will focus on the development of a community-based historic site investigation in the city of Providence that contemplates two phases: 1) programs of community-engaged research that support the build-out of a web archive of historic primary source material, and 2) art and storytelling programs that use the Pond Street archive to make choices about what stories are important to share (to return to the community memory) and how they can be shared (permanent or ephemeral, oral or visual, virtual or concrete). The course will introduce students to the neighborhood and its history. Students will be invited to develop and design research and archival programs that respond to questions about community, diversity, access, inclusion, and connection. Students will be introduced to the landscape of community organizations and institutions that might participate in these programs. Students will also engage in their own research project using scholarly best practices to build a mini-archive around a specific individual or individuals, institution or institutions, or which respond to specific questions of race, diversity, immigration, ethnicity, and class using the project site as a primary lens of examination. Students will engage in readings of history and historiography that question the shaping of history and history-telling, the role of power and authority in the construction of history, and current questions about tourism, consumerism, development and gentrification, and community in contemporary history-telling. The outcomes of the coursework will emphasize the development of understanding and skill in scholarly historical research, narrative design, and the history and historiography of placemaking.

Visions of youthful utopia in Monterey Pop (1968) give way to violence and mayhem in Gimmie Shelter (Rolling Stones, 1970). Martin Scorsese offers an epilogue to an era in The Last Waltz (The Band, 1978). Madonna sells herself in Truth or Dare (1991) and Metallica undergoes group therapy in Some Kind of Monster (2004). Rock documentaries are as much about the social and political state of America as they are about music and musicians. In this course, we will explore the visual language and cultural history of the rockumentary film genre. Topics for discussion will include: documentary and cinema Veriti narrative forms; the troubled notion of documentary "truth"; music as commercial product; fandom and the cult of celebrity; and the rise of MTV. Students should be prepared to participate in class discussion, attend film screenings, complete critical readings, and hone their analytical writing skills.

In this writing workshop, we will explore the short story form, working to put into words what we-as individual readers-hope to find in it. We will consider what makes a story a story, while acknowledging that it is often something ineffable, indefinable. We will read from a range of writers, including Alice Munro, Donald Barthelme, Roberto Bolaño, and Vladimir Nabokov. A significant amount of class time will be devoted to writing exercises and peer workshops. At the end of the term, students will be expected to submit a portfolio comprised of informal reading responses, writing exercises, and completed stories.

"The Cookbook: The Rhetoric of Recipes" is a course designed to look at the form and rhetoric of cookbooks. Cookbooks are their own distinct genre. There are rules that must be followed, though the range of possibilities are multitudinous. A cookbook entirely about bugs? Sure. A cookbook on gelatin desserts? In the 1960s there were dozens. But a cookbook ostensibly is both tantalizing and informative. It aims to make the reader want to eat the dish that it introduces, and it gives clear instruction about how to produce that dish. The course begins by looking medieval recipes, many of them found online at Cooking in the Archive. From there the course moves to looking at the culinary essays of Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the founders of culinary writing. Then we move to MFK Fisher and James Beard, before looking at Julia Child and Jacques Pepin and the rise of the celebrity chef. In the course students will be asked to deconstruct recipes. What makes a recipe successful? The rhetoric of cookbooks is an art, just as is poetry or memoir writing. Some cookbooks are literature, others are pulp. Over the course of five weeks, students will begin to learn how to create a recipe that both instructs and entices. They will learn how personality enters a cookbook, and how something like Marcus Samuelsson's The Soul of a New Cuisine is ultimately more about the writer than the recipes. By the course's end, each student will produce their own cookbook.

Professional actor/director Fred Sullivan (Trinity Repertory Company/Gamm Theatre/ Commonwealth Shakespeare resident artist and RISD Acting Workshop instructor) will guide a company of student actors, designers, stage managers through a workshop process of producing a live play for the stage, culminating in a two public performances of the production. Students in this course will be asked to: rehearse and perform assigned roles; accept assigned duties on graphic, projection and property/costume design, construction and stage management crews; commit to a flexible rehearsal schedule outside of class meetings; and pursue a guided study of the dramaturgical and production elements of the play or plays being produced. Under consideration for this Wintersession production is a selection of short plays by modern masters and original work. The structure of the selected play will be analyzed for its themes and historic context as well. The play will furthermore be examined for its unique performance techniques and production requirements. Sign up, put on some comfortable clothes and come to the first class ready to play.

"Crime is terribly revealing," Agatha Christie wrote in her 1936 novel "The ABC Murders." In the genre known as "True Crime" - which, unlike Christie's novels, deals with real events -- there is a long and colorful history of examining crimes to see what, exactly, they reveal. This class is an introduction to this genre through classic texts (Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", the Library of America's True Crime anthology), texts that challenge conventions (Rick Geary's graphic novel, "The Borden Tragedy"; Moises Kaufman's stage play, "The Laramie Project"), and texts that spill over in other media, including documentary film, television, radio, and photography. Over the course of the term, students will not only become familiar with most famous crimes in American history -- recognizable by names like Manson and "O.J." -- but they will also explore the role crime plays in the history of a state that some call "Rogue's Island." Most importantly, the course is an opportunity for students to wrestle with the questions that the best True Crime stories pose. What is a crime? What is justice? And why are we perennially drawn to these stories?

The advanced workshop assumes that students have some experience with writing fiction and are ready for an environment that will challenge them to hone, revise, and distill their craft. A writer begins inspired by dreams, language, a face in a crowd. But inspiration is only the beginning of a writer's work. In this course we'll study form, theme, voice, language, character, and plot. We'll also read and talk about stories by masters of the craft. The aim of the workshop is to help you discover what your stories want to be and fulfill the promise of your original vision.

Prerequisite: LAS-E412: Beginning Fiction Writing Workshop or equivalent experience.

Open to sophomore and above.

Permission of Instructor required.

The Advanced Poetry Workshop is an intensive project-based poetry workshop for students with previous workshop experience and a portfolio of revised work on which to build. The course centers on workshop: peer critique by students with previous practice in poetry writing, and the shared goal of completing a semester-long publication/performance project. Students are expected to have a strong commitment to active participation in contemporary poetry as readers, writers, curators, performers, and audience. Teaching and learning methodologies include close reading of exemplary texts, experimentation with forms, revision, online/print publication, and performance. Texts will include poetry collections published in 2019 and 2020, as selected by students and instructor. The workshop welcomes work in any language and from any tradition of poetry. To the greatest extent possible, the work should speak for itself. But mediation, translation, contextualization also play a vital role.

Prerequisite: LAS-E411 Beginning Poetry Writing Workshop, or equivalent experience.

Open to sophomore and above.

Permission of Instructor required.

We begin with a study of the bird painters, illustrators and photographers, most notably, of course, John James Audubon, and continue with the symbolic bird of poetry and literature, such as Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson--the bird as woman--and examine the bird as omen and warning--the ecological and environmental indicator of human fate. Our books include such recent essays and memoirs as Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals -- an indictment of the poultry industry and a plea for vegetarianism--and also the arguments both personal/subjective and yet also scientific for the intelligence of birds such as the bestseller books Alex: The Parrot that Owned Me and Wesley the Barn Owl, in which birds appear not so much as pets but rather as companion creatures who share our destiny and condition.

Our course will include actual birdwatching during times of migration or nest-building, either locally within the borders of our campus world, or beyond its frontiers. Migration has always meant the crossing of national barriers, and therefore a promise of peace and order despite the turmoil under the skies. We read, we watch, and we design projects relevant to the various meanings of birds to be found in books.

Digital technologies have shaped contemporary media and culture in profound ways, including how we make, experience, and talk about art, design, commerce, and culture, bodies, identities, and communities, privacy, security, and war, time, space, and geography, and even the politics of meaning and "truth" themselves. In this course, we will look specifically to late 20th and early 21st century cinema -- ostensibly now an "old" medium -- to help us understand (and sometimes productively misunderstand) new media. What is new media and what can cinema specifically tell us about it? What has become of cinema, both culturally and structurally, under the digital? How has cinema historically represented new or emergent media technologies? How have forms of vision and perception that have emerged or intensified alongside new media -- satellites, drones, surveillance, smart phones, etc. -- troubled cinema on formal, stylistic, and epistemological levels? What kinds of new or transformative potential has new media unearthed for future cinemas? Through readings of contemporary media studies scholarship, weekly film screenings, and student presentations, we will take up these and related questions.

Open to sophomore and above.

This course examines contemporary American fiction and film, meaning that the narratives (family narratives, historical narratives, and so on) were written or produced within the past twenty years. Specific titles will change each semester in an effort to study current ideas and styles. Writers of significant stature in American literature, like Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy, will be included, as will notable new writers, including Adam Johnson, Marisha Pessl, and Jennifer Egan. A film will be scheduled and discussed during class each week. While some narratives directly confront contemporary American culture, others may look at the present indirectly, using history, or focus on events in other parts of the world, as in Paul Theroux's The Lower River. Attention will be paid to satirical portraits of the American family and to political narratives, whether they address global conflicts or the politics of work, family, friendship, identity, love, and sex. Short interpretive papers will be required in response to the fiction and film each week. Class attendance and thoughtful participation are mandatory.

Tolstoy's famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina reminds us that families provide a lot of good material for fiction and film narratives. "All happy families resemble one another," he writes, "but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This seminar will take a look at unhappy and happy families alike and will consider alternative or surrogate family structures and definitions of home. Contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth, Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to name a few, take us inside homes where identities are formed and where they clash. We will also study family portraiture in film to extend our understanding of the subject's narrative possibilities. Students must be prepared to participate in class, must know how to read narratives closely, and must be able to write specific and detailed papers each week in response to assigned material. Research outside of the class material is expected.

Open to sophomore and above.

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments.

Required for graduation for all undergraduates, including transfers. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

For the Fall semester, freshmen are pre-registered into this course.

Please contact the department concerning any registration questions.

In the last decades, modernist studies has moved far beyond its initial focus on a group of male Anglo-American High Modernists writing between 1890 and 1940. What the field now refers to as modernisms encompass popular and elite forms alike, some emphasizing stylistic form and others not, authored by men and women of diverse racial and national identities, class backgrounds, and political affiliations. Like modernity, which modernism is generally seen to respond to, modernism viewed on a global scale has appeared unevenly and irregularly across time and geographic space and thus defies periodization. This course will survey global literary modernisms from a comparative perspective, attending to how the notions of the world and the modern are engaged in texts by such authors as Charles Baudelaire (France), Joseph Conrad (England), Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Anna Akhmatova (Russia), Constantine Cavafy (Greece), Rabindranath Tagore (India), Jean Rhys (Dominican Rep.), Nella Larsen (U.S.), Jorge Luiz Borges (Argentina), Aimé Cesaré (Martinique), Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (Turkey), Eileen Chang (China), and others.

In this course, we will explore several of the rich literary traditions of the Middle East and North Africa in their artistic, political, and historical contexts. Many of the traditions we will study take place under forced contact with European cultural and political institutions from the 19th century to the present. For this reason, our inquiry will pay particular attention to topics such as tradition, colonialism, and gender politics in Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon. Readings will include works by Assia Djebar, Mahmoud Darwish, Amin Maalouf, Naguib Mahfouz, and Ghassan Kanafani.

Ireland has a long history of literature, stretching from pre-Christian epics through monastic manuscripts right up to the thriving contemporary scene. While there are many important Irish writers before the beginning of the twentieth century, clearly the birth of the Abbey theatre and the poetry of W. B. Yeats and the prose of James Joyce created reverberations still felt in Ireland today. Using Joyce, Synge, and Yeats as a beginning point, in this seminar we will look at a series of contemporary Irish writers whose work builds upon the foundation established in the early years of the twentieth century. One of the themes we will return to again and again in this course is the theme of loss - loss of language, loss of sovereignty, loss of loved ones. What does Stephen mean when he says, "History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to awake"? Why is Yeats left in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart"?

There are few things that represent the non-human better than the alien. Not of this world, often not even humanoid, the alien serves as the ultimate Other-something that does not belong, something that is different in a fundamental way, something that is often unknowable, something completely and utterly foreign. Gary Westfahl writes that "aliens are both metaphors and real possibilities" (16). As fundamentally non-human, though sometimes humanoid, the alien acts as a mirror to humanity, showing us the best, though more often, the worst of our own impulses. Aliens can be used to look inward, to probe the nature of humanity and thereby illustrate and comment upon human impulses, morals, and values. However, the ubiquity of aliens across media demonstrate that "humans also crave companionship in a vast, cold universe and aliens may represent hopeful, compensatory images of the strange friends we have been unable to find" (Westfahl 16). Symbolically, this plays out in a number of ways. The alien might represent an Other based on gender, sexuality, or race. The alien might be friendly, here to help mankind, opportunistic, here to plunder our natural resources, or downright evil, bent on eating, incubating in, or wiping out our civilization. This class will examine a number of Science Fiction works that feature aliens, from Octavia Butler, H.G. Wells, and C.J. Cherryh, to films by Ridley Scott, Steven Speilberg, and Neill Blomkamp. We will also draw on a number of theoretical authors, from Barbara Creed and Julia Kristeva, to Gary Westfahl and Darko Suvin.

The Independent Study Project (ISP) allows students to supplement the established curriculum by completing a faculty supervised project for credit in a specific area of interest. Its purpose is to meet individual student needs by providing an alternative to regularly offered courses.

Permission of Instructor and GPA of 3.0 or higher is required.

Register by completing the Independent Study Application available on the Registrar's website; the course is not available via web registration.

This course registers an outgoing exchange student into a pre-approved LAS course which is taken at the exchange school. Successful completion of the course will result in a "T" grade once receipt of the official transcript from the partner school has arrived at Registrar's Office.

The word "liary" references the seven volumes of Anais Nin's diaries, which, upon their publication, were denounced by Nin's friends as utter fiction, as the "liary." This course will treat this insult as the basis for a literary genre: the fiction of life itself. We will focus on the production of liaries: fiction using real life - your own. But rather than thinking about lived experience as the raw material of fiction which finds expression through words, we will think about words themselves as the medium through which the fiction of life can be constructed. In this course, we will be fully invested in the materiality of words and the functionality of fiction. We will collide with words as if they were a particularly willful batch of clay, to find different ways in which fictionality is created when a word is imagined to give contour to the slippery moments of living.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was a practical-minded painter and engraver who sought artistic independence from aristocratic patronage and cultural respect for printmaking as an art. His greatest innovation was a form of narrative painting and printmaking, marketed to the public at large, in which he presented original stories, essentially visual novels, that challenged the groups that had until then controlled the content and distribution of art, that is, the religious and political establishments. William Blake (1757-1827) was a profoundly impractical painter, poet and engraver who challenged church, state, commerce, and everything else, including time and space, illustrating his own stories and visions as well as a very large proportion of past literary works in ways that reveal their visionary potential. We will study an array of Hogarth's serial and independent works, as well as several of Blake's "illuminated books," literary and biblical illustrations, and un-illustrated poems. Students will do independent research and write short papers for all class meetings.

Also offered as LAS-C221; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
LAS-E101 is a prerequisite if taken for LAS credit.

The focus of this course will be a reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost in the context of western narratives that combine creation myths with a philosophical exploration of human subjectivity and agency. Some ancient pre-texts considered might be the Book of Genesis, Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, and Lucretius's De rerum natura. The course will conclude by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a response to and extension of this "tradition."

Literature is one facet of culture. The significance of literature can be best understood in terms of the culture for which it springs, and the purpose is clear only when the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which literature is based" (Paula Gunn Allen-Laguna Sioux poet). This course will explore value systems and aesthetics that are from very diverse Native cultures, focusing on the ways in which indigenousness relates to literature and storytelling. The critical methodologies developed by Native critics such as Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe writer and scholar), and Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek-Cherokee author and professor of Native Studies) will enable us to study Native frameworks and new ways to regard literature/histories. We will explore questions such as can Native American theory/literature transform or challenge non-Native critical theoretical strategies. Our discussions, which may take a variety of directions, will also examine such issues as American Indian identities and communities as well as the impact of colonization on tribal peoples.

Taking its cue from Clint Eastwood who proclaimed, "As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz," this course will analyze the Western film as an art form in and of itself. We will discuss Westerns in terms of their specific aesthetic and technological influence on the medium, their cultural expression of a national political unconscious, and their global function as the meta-narrative of space. This course will tackle these discussions through a chronological unfolding of the genre starting with the Edison Company's 1898 Westerns and Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the Golden Age of John Ford and Howard Hawks' films and the reciprocal translation of Akira Kurosawa's epics, and finally, to the variants of the Spaghetti, Revisionist, and genre-bending contemporary and postmodern Westerns of Dennis Hopper, Sam Peckinpah, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Wim Wenders. There will be required readings in critical film theory, weekly screenings, analytical essays, and oral presentations.

Although it dovetails with LAS E211, usually offered in the fall, this discussion-based course can be taken by itself. It surveys major and minor works of British literature, mostly poetry and prose fiction, from the late 1700s to the early 20th century, with consideration of the way these works relate to broad social and cultural phenomena including philosophy, gender politics, aesthetics and visual arts. Regular homework exercises emphasize independent critical and investigative reading of complex texts and images; formal writing assignments develop your ability to combine your insights with those gained from research, open-book midterm and final exams allow you to demonstrate your ability to analyze unfamiliar works and place them in context with those we have studied. Readings include (mostly short) works by Charlotte Smith, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley ("Transformation"), Tennyson, Elizabeth B. and Robert Browning, Hopkins, Housman, Yeats, Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Conrad ("The Secret Sharer"), and Lawrence.

In "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961), Frantz Fanon writes, "The relations of man with matter, with the world outside, and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food." Fanon recognizes that for the colonized subject existence itself is so threatened that every bit of food one can gain access to is, as he writes, "a victory felt as a triumph for life." The foods people choose to eat and the ways they prepare those foods speak volumes about their relationship to the land and reflect their history. Postcolonial storytellers, writers, and filmmakers use food and foodways as markers of independence, as symbols of cultural colonization, and as signs of continued deprivations. Through foodways one can glimpse famines, invasions, and historical access to trade networks, and food itself can even serve as a vehicle for communication. Since these stories are not constructed in a vacuum, they also can reveal something about what food means in specific historical moments, in specific places, and for specific populations. This course will look at the roles food and foodways play in a series of narratives from formerly colonized spaces. Writers we will read may include Chris Abani, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Open to sophomore and above.

This seminar is grounded in two premises. The first is that the world is founded on anti-blackness and the second is that black feminist authors write with an awareness of this fact and the desire to imagine this world otherwise. Focusing on works of speculative fiction such as Octavia Butler's Dawn and Toni Morrison's Beloved, as well as less easily classifiable texts such as Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters and Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, this course considers how the use of non-realist elements in realist (protest fiction and neo-slave narratives) and non-realist (such as afro-futurism) genres serve as important means of both critiquing the gendered anti-blackness that affects black women's life chances and imagining a future not predicated on simply enrolling black being in the existing hierarchies of human being. Put otherwise, this course will investigate how black feminist writers have used speculative fiction and/or elements of speculative fiction to attempt to image not only their own freedom but also the freedom of all beings arranged within the social and political hierarchies built upon their backs.

This seminar attempts to do two things: first, we examine the global careers of the English language and the literatures written in it from their period of ascendance during the height of British colonialism in the late-19th century to their proliferation in the postcolonial present to argue for a concept of multiple "Englishes" in place of one dominant, normative, authentic 'English';second, we explore the hypothesis that the discourse of "Global Englishes" is not just constituted in writing and literature as most scholars have argued but also through everyday performance, and often through spoken forms. So, a discussion of the cultural politics of speaking and listening across different sonic media will supplement the regular study of selected fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, films, television, and music. Topics discussed will include variations in the uses of literary English, translations and adaptations, varieties of spoken Englishes, accents and code-switching, multilingualism in literary texts, etc. Historical and theoretical contexts will include colonialism and postcolonialism, economic and cultural globalization, identity politics, exile and migration, literary prizes, circulation and readership, etc. Not surprisingly, most of the authors we will read are from ex-colonies of the British Empire which now have thriving English language literary and cultural traditions of their own, like India and Pakistan, Nigeria and South Africa, Canada and Australia, Ireland and the Caribbean region. Since the United Kingdom's and the United States' Englishes, even though dominant, are still part of 'the global' we will read some representative texts from Scotland or Wales, for instance, as well as "US ethnic literatures." Authors may include Rudyard Kipling, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, G V Desani, Salman Rushdie, J M Coetzee, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Michèle Lalonde, Derek Walcott, Brian Friel, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Mohsin Hamid, M. NourbeSe Philip, Irvine Welsh, Caroline Bergvall, and Junot Diaz. Open to sophomore and above.

Open to sophomore and above.

This seminar has two primary goals:

1. To engage critically with natural history as a literary and visual art form and with its history as a scientific practice.

2. To collaborate on projects and experiments that employ digital and analog methods for analyzing, interpreting, archiving, curating, and creating visual and literary works of natural history. Throughout the semester, we will visit local museums, labs, archives, and field sites to facilitate these goals.

Natural history is a crucial genre for understanding the origins of modern environmentalism, the history of science, discourses of race, and the nature of European imperialism. As an artistic and epistemological practice, natural history enjoyed the height of its popularity during the early modern and enlightenment periods, as European explorers, traders, and colonizers endeavored to classify, catalog, explain, and exploit the diverse flora and fauna all over the planet. In the process, they encountered (and often ignored or stole from) the complex folk biology of various indigenous cultures. Especially in the Americas, natural historical knowledge production depended on the collaboration of various cultures within profoundly uneven power dynamics: European explorers and creolized American naturalists, political leaders and ordinary citizens, amateur collectors and professional theorists, men and women, slaveholders and enslaved people, and Euro-colonial traders and indigenous Americans. Furthermore, early naturalists were polymaths --scientists, philosophers, political leaders, artists, writers, collectors, and traders --before the stratification of the modern sciences into disciplines that took place during the nineteenth century. As science became a more professional and specialized endeavor, natural history evolved into various forms of amateur field science, environmental art, and nature writing, an evolution this course will actively examine through reading, conversation, and practice. As such, our course materials will range from classical antiquity to the present and cover a large variety of written forms and artistic mediums.

Modern Jewish literary form and content developed from the 19th-century emancipation with its socialist, Zionist, and romantic options. We move from these roots to the satiric and elegiac voice of contemporary America. Authors studied will include Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Singer, Elie Wiesel, Bernard Malamud.

What is political about theatre and performance and when does politics become theatrical? What are some of the assumptions and desires that animate the relationship between theatre, performance, and politics? How has this relationship been practiced, understood and theorized over time, and most importantly, in contemporary circumstances? What relationship does political theatre have with the local, the national and the transnational? This course seeks to approach these questions through readings that may include works by Sophocles, Brecht, Heaney, Boal, Friel, Churchill, Edgar, Tendulkar, Soyinka, Fusco, Deavere Smith, Pinter and Nottage along with relevant theoretical texts. Screenings might include videos related to recent US presidential elections, musical and artistic performances, and acts of contemporary culture jamming activists like "The Yes Men."

Thanks to the work and lives of transgender people, we now have room to understand our bodies in radically unbounded ways. Technological advances in surgery, hormonal therapy, psychiatry, cultural warfare, are catching up to the transgender presence: the gendered body is not necessarily that with which we were born, but one that can be crafted to match the real body of our psyche, our dreams. However, one's racial self remains tethered to biology. Blackness, Whiteness, Asianness, Latinness, the whole rainbow of racial identification, is still construed as biologically inescapable and inevitable. To speak of "transracialism" is to evoke self-delusion and community betrayal. But this cultural reaction is contrary to the everyday experience that actually finds racial identification as a process that is always transracial: declaring ourselves racially, we all cross restricted zones in becoming ourselves. In this course, we will use the discourse of transgenderism to build an alternate vocabulary of race.

Visual Poetry has been defined by Willard Bohn as "poetry that is meant to be seen." There are traditions of visual poetry in many cultures, ancient, modern, and contemporary, and because meaning is invested in pattern, color, dimension, texture, graphics, image, and animation as well as in the word, these poems can communicate whether or not you understand the language they are written in, and in many more ways than linear narrative. In a sense, visual poetry is language's own disappearing trick. This courses introduces students to cross-cultural traditions of visual poetry, including pattern poetry, illumination, concrete poetry, and what digital poet and theorist David Jhave Johnston calls TAVs (textaudio- visual poems) and TAVITs (text-audio-visual-interactive poems). Particular attention will be paid to contemporary practitioners, and to relationships between material traditions of poetry including sound, visual, and digital. Students will build knowledge; compose and publish visual poems; and write and present a research paper. Texts and references may include Dick Higgins, A Short History of Pattern Poetry, William Blake, Songs of Innocence & of Experience, Adam Pendleton, Black Dada Reader, Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis, The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008; works by Willard Bohn, Emmett Williams, Mary Ellen Solt, Johanna Drucker; and the archive ubuweb.

In this course, we will discuss how comics and other forms of literary-visual art illuminate various environmental concepts. Environmental problems are caused not merely by technological expansion or political negligence. They also result from, and persist as, problems of representation. An environmental crisis is a cultural crisis. Beginning from this position, we will consider comics art as a unique medium for telling stories about how humans and other animals relate to their environments, focusing especially on the form's capacity for representing time, space, word, and image in sequence. To further enrich our understanding of the cultural values and concepts that undergird the environmental decisions individuals, communities, and institutions make every day, we will examine how environmental problems intersect with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. As astute environmental critics, we will dismantle the experience of reading comics, and the craft of making them, through frequent in-class discussions, creative projects, and a series of analytical assignments in both written and comics form. These assignments will help us come to understand comics art as a medium for both creative and critical invention. Throughout the semester, we will read comics in various formats and genres, including (but not limited to) graphic novels, comic strips, serialized comic books, zines, web comics, illustrated journals, manga, memoir, biography, fiction, and journalism.

Open to sophomore and above.

Hollywood films: how are they "written" by directors, performers, scriptcrafters, cameramen and producers? We will view a selection of films featuring directors who stamped Hollywood and us with their visions, often from other cultures. We will also study the direction Hollywood took in interpreting the Depression, War, and Recovery, and the direction stars, writers and designers chose in defining themselves. This is a course in criticism, history and articulate appreciation.