Freshman Writing Seminars

Every entering freshman is required to elect a Freshman Writing Seminar. These courses have a maximum enrollment of 17 freshmen and are offered by a number of departments. Designed as introductions to their respective disciplines, they emphasize the effective expression of ideas through written and oral work.

Students who receive advanced placement credit in any subject are not exempt from this requirement. Students with advanced placement scores of 4 or 5 in English may still elect English 101 and will receive credit for it.

You will note that most of the Freshman Writing Seminars are offered in the fall semester. We strongly recommend that you include a Freshman Writing Seminar among your course selections for the fall term; the pre-registration form included in your packet underscores this recommendation. While you may elect more than one Freshman Writing Seminar in your first year, you may not enroll in more than two Freshman Writing Seminars per semester (and you may not enroll in English 101 more than once). Students not taking a Freshman Writing Seminar in the fall will be given priority in selecting a Freshman Writing Seminar for the spring semester.

Specific information about the English 101 sections:

Freshman English is not required for graduation. Every section of English 101, however, is a Freshman Writing Seminar.
Students who have a 4 or 5 on the advanced placement examination may elect an intermediate-level course in either semester of their freshman year, but only after consultation with the department on August 28. AP students may also elect English 170 in the fall semester. Students with AP credit who have taken English 101 and want to continue in English are advised to take English 170 or an intermediate-level course in the spring.
No freshman may enroll in more than one English course in a single semester.
English 101 may not be taken more than once.
Students planning either to major in English or to pursue intermediate work in English are strongly encouraged to take 101 and 170 in sequence.
Students unable to secure a place in English 101 in the first semester will be given priority during registration for English 101 in the second semester. Students who plan to take intermediate work in English but who are unable to secure a place in 101 in the fall are advised to take 101 in the spring semester.

FALL SECTIONS

Africana Studies 105a. The Fire This Time: Hip Hop and Critical Citizenship

The American mainstream has a voracious appetite for various forms of subcultural black expression. Though varied, Black American cultural expression is often anchored in rhetorical battles or verbal jousts that place one character against another. From sorrow songs to blues, black music has always been a primary means of cultural expression and survival for African Americans, particularly during difficult social periods and transition. Black Americans have used music and particularly rhythmic verse to resist, express and signify citizenship or belonging. Nowhere is this more evident than in hip hop culture generally and hip hop music specifically. One could argue that hip hop music, at its best, attempts to reveal and complicate ideas of citizenship while demystifying private and contested public American space. As Tricia Rose writes in Black Noise, “Hip Hop combines the improvisational elements of jazz with the narrative sense of place in the blues; it has the oratory power of the black preacher and the emotional vulnerability of Southern soul music.” The result is a new vibrant American text that deserves exploration.

This course is a comprehensive freshman writing seminar that thoughtfully approaches hip hop as a meaningful, critical and ever-changing post-modern text. In addition to looking at some established hip hop rivalries and forming a complete hip hop timeline that begins in the belly of slave ships, we will look at hip hop as the epitome of metafictional post-modernity. We will explore the connection between hip hop and West African chants, southern African American sorrow songs, gospel texts, blues texts, funk texts, punk texts, rock texts, and the texts from the Harlem Renaissance. One of the aims of the course is to encourage students and listeners to treat hip hop music as neither disposable commodity, nor cool art form, but as literary text, complete with hefty subtext and pointed democratic signifiers.

AFRS 105.02 TR 10:30-11:45 Mr. Laymon

Africana Studies 160a. Books, Children, and Culture

(Same as EDUC 160) This course examines select classical works from the oral tradition and contemporary works of children's fiction and non-fiction. The course addresses juvenile literature as a sociological phenomenon as well as a literary and artistic one (illustrative content). The course traces the socio-historical development of American children's literature from Western and non-Western societies. Social, psychoanalytic, and educational theory provide a conceptual basis and methodological framework for the cultural analysis of fairy tale and modern fantasy in cross-cultural perspective. Socialization issues include: ideals of democracy; moral character; race and class; politicalization; and the human relationship to the natural environment.

AFRS 160.01 TR 9:00-10:15 Ms. Bickerstaff

American Culture 180a. "Something is About to Happen" – America in the World's Imagination

"No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores, with a stronger faith in the republic than I had, when I landed in America" — so claimed Charles Dickens, in his account of an 1842 visit across the Atlantic to the young democracy. What did he see? More importantly: what did he hope or expect to see? This course considers literature (novels and short stories, essays, travel writing, journalism and manifestos), film, music and visual art that approaches "America" — as an idea, a hope, a promise, an empire or merely an unreasonably large piece of land — from abroad. Possible authors include Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Karl Marx, Sayyid Qutb, Graham Greene, Jessica Hagedorn and Martin Amis. Sample artists include Fela Kuti, the Clash, Tseng Kwong Chi and Jean-Luc Godard.

AMCL 180.01 TR 3:10-4:25 Mr. Hsu

Astronomy 150a. Life in the Universe

An introduction to the possibility of life beyond Earth is presented from an astronomical point of view. The course reviews stellar and planetary formation and evolution, star properties and planetary atmospheres necessary for a habitable world, possibilities for other life in our solar system, detection of extrasolar planets, the SETI project, and the Drake equation.

Prerequisite: High school physics and calculus.

ASTR 150.01 MWF 11:00-11:50 Ms. Sheffield

Chinese/Japanese 120a. Introduction to Chinese and Japanese Literature

This course introduces some of the major works of Chinese and Japanese literature, including philosophical works, novels, and films. Thematically, the course is organized around the way that major intellectual trends influence one another in particular texts. We see how Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist values and concepts resonate in the love story, Dream of the Red Chamber; the war novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms; the erotic novel, Carnal Prayer Mat; and the enigmatic film, Rashomon, by Kurosawa. At the end of the course, we examine the interaction of modernity and classic thought in the film Hero by Zhang Yimou and in Yukio Mishima's controversial novella, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Requirements include brief weekly reaction papers and several papers of medium length, emphasizing the development of basic skills in writing about literary and cultural topics and texts. All readings and discussions are in English.

CHJA 120.01 TR 12:00-1:15 Mr. Van Norden

Classics 180a. Classical Rhetoric and the 2008 Presidential Campaign

We are all inundated by words and images intended to persuade: from advertisers, from politicians, even from supposedly neutral news sources. All of these employ rhetoric, which finds its roots in the birth of democracy in ancient Greece and has remained central in Western discourse until the present day, despite persistent ambivalence toward it. One goal of this course is to understand rhetoric's significance in the ancient world, which we approach through readings from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others. The course also considers the role of rhetoric in contemporary American society, for the course coincides with a flood of rhetoric as the 2008 presidential campaign unfolds, not only in the candidates' speeches, but also in their campaign advertisements and the media coverage they receive. We analyze these materials in order to understand the influence of the classical theory of rhetoric, which treats, for example, figures of speech, arrangement of material, and the nature of metaphors. Some may be surprised to discover the continuing relevance of the ancient theorists of rhetoric, even in an age when, one suspects, most purveyors of persuasive discourse are not familiar with those sources. Writing assignments include analyses of historic examples of rhetoric and of speeches and advertisements from the political campaign, as well as exercises aimed at making our own writing styles more persuasive.

CLAS 180.01 MW 12:00-1:15 Mr. Dozier

Earth Science 111a. Earth Science and Environmental Justice

(Same as GEOG 111) Exploration of the roles that race, gender, and class play in contemporary environmental issues, and the geology that underlies them. Examination of the power of governments, corporations, and science to influence the physical and human environment. We critique the traditional environmental movement, study cases of environmental racism, and appreciate how basic geological knowledge can assist communities in creating healthful surroundings. Examples come from urban and rural settings in the United States and abroad and are informed by feminist analysis.

ESCI 111.01 TR 1:30-2:45 Ms. Schneiderman

Education 160a. Books, Children, and Culture

(Same as AFRS 160) This course examines select classical works from the oral tradition and contemporary works of children's fiction and non-fiction. The course addresses juvenile literature as a sociological phenomenon as well as a literary and artistic one (illustrative content). The course traces the socio-historical development of American children's literature from Western and non-Western societies. Social, psychoanalytic, and educational theory provide a conceptual basis and methodological framework for the cultural analysis of fairy tale and modern fantasy in cross-cultural perspective. Socialization issues include: ideals of democracy; moral character; race and class; politicalization; and the human relationship to the natural environment.

EDUC 160.01 TR 9:00-10:15 Ms. Bickerstaff

English 101a. Early British Literature

Texts will include Beowulf and other Old English poetry, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl (all in translation), selections from Chaucer and other Middle English poets (in Middle English), and Renaissance verse and drama, including Shakespeare.

ENGL 101.01 MW 9:00-10:15 Mr. Amodio

English 101a. Making Voices

Novels, plays, anatomies, verse, and autobiography in which some of the characters and all of the authors try to discover and create their own voices in order to imagine their distinctive works and selves. Authors read may include Austen, Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Swift, Twain, Philip Sidney, Anne Sexton, and Maya Angelou.

ENGL 101.02 TR 4:35-5:50 Mr. Weedin
ENGL 101.07 TR 9:00-10:15 Mr. Weedin

English 101a. The Symbolic Quest

This course will explore the mythological and psychological origins of the quest motif and its manifestation in a variety of literary texts. Our study may include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Milton's Paradise Lost, and works by Blake, Winterson, and Zimmerman.

ENGL 101.03 WF 12:00-1:15 Ms. Darlington

English 101a. What's Love Got To Do With It?

This course is centered on representations of love (filial, parental, sexual, etc.) from antiquity to the present. Situating the selected works in their contemporary cultural and historical contexts, the course explores significant differences as well as possible continuities between past and present interpretations and representations of such basic concepts and institutions as gender, family, marriage, filial and marital duties, the private sphere, and sexuality. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet serves as a chronological center for these investigations, but we will also discuss passages from the Bible and selected texts (representing diverse dramatic, epic, and lyric genres) by Sophocles, Aristophanes, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, Ted Hughes, and others. In addition, we will look at various adaptations (musical, theatrical, fine arts) of Romeo and Juliet as well as film versions directed by George Cukor (1936), Renato Castellani (1954), Jiri Weiss (1960), Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise (1961), Franco Zeffirelli (1968), and Baz Luhrmann (1996).

ENGL 101.04 TR 1:30-2:45 Mr. Márkus
ENGL 101.11 WF 1:30-2:45 Mr. Márkus

English 101a. What's News: Inside Story

This course will explore the history, theory, practice, and control of newswriting from 1475 to the present. Weekly assignments will include newsgathering, an interview, a personal profile, a historical report, an investigation, an op-ed piece, and a blog. Venues of research will include online databases, the Vassar library, and the street. The assigned readings will cover the history and ethics of news-writing, and selections from every important mode of journalistic communications.

ENGL 101.05 MW 12:00-1:15 Mr. Foster

English 101a. Imagining Australia

This course considers various and competing visions of Australia from the pre-colonial period to the present. Australia looks very different when seen from the perspectives of the Aborigines, the early settlers, the nationalists, or any of the urban and rural groups that make up the current multicultural population. Each of these versions is an imagining of what Australia is or could be. To explore such imaginings, we will focus primarily on Australia's rich literary tradition (including works by Aboriginal writers), examining a wide range of texts comprising fiction, drama, poetry, autobiography, and oral transcriptions. In addition to literary, historical, and critical works, we will also consider paintings, films, and music in order to appreciate the general social and cultural contexts. Writers to be studied include Peter Carey, Jill Ker Conway, Les Murray, Judith Wright, Philip Hodgins, Sally Morgan, Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonucal, and others.

ENGL 101.06 TR 10:30-11:45 Mr. Kane

English 101a. Reading the Romance

Romance fiction accounts for over a quarter of all books sold annually with an estimated revenue of 1.37 billion dollars. Though immensely popular, this genre is ignored by both academia and mainstream media. All other genre fictions — mystery, westerns, scifi, fantasy — have a place in the New York Times book review and in the college classroom. Yet, romance remains invisible. This class will consider why and how the genre has become culturally marginalized. What does romance's historical trajectory and contemporary status say about gender, class, race, capitalist culture, and the shape of the literary canon? How did we get from the genre of romance being an important node in English literary production to a popular moneymaker but invisible cultural player? What about the audience? How do these reading communities from the Middle Ages to today impact the genre's shape? We will explore a variety of romance texts in verse, prose, and drama including Apollonius of Tyre, Lais of Marie de France, The Romance of Silence, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, St. Juliana, the works of Shakespeare, John Donne's poetry, Aphra Behn's Oronooko, Jane Austen's Emma, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and popular paperback romances.

ENGL 101.09 TR 1:30-2:45 Ms. Kim

English 101a. Queer Alphabets

A primer in gay and lesbian literature, both classic and contemporary. We will examine a range of texts, including recent coming out stories, 19th-century encoded texts, a silent movie from 1919 Germany, the sonnets of Shakespeare and the love poems of Adrienne Rich. Novels will include James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance, and Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine.

ENGL 101.12 MW 1:30-2:45 Mr. Russell

English 101a. Autobiography and Fiction

In this course we will begin by distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction, then go on to study the shameless and covert ways that different forms borrow from one another, sometimes smearing the boundaries. Among the questions that we'll consider are the benefits of drawing on personally revealing, even embarrassing material; the differences between lying and storytelling; the importance of narrative guise or impersonation; and the confidence with which we can identify truth amidst distortion and inaccuracy. Readings will include Dubliners by James Joyce, The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolfe, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir by Lauren Slater, Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov, and shorter works by Ray Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Tim O'Brien, and Joan Didion.

ENGL 101.13 TR 10:30-11:45 Mr. Crawford ENGL 101.21 TR 1:30-2:45 Mr. Crawford

English 101a. Short Forms

This course will explore various (and numerous) examples of the interrelated literary forms, the prose poem and the so-called " short-short" story. We'll examine these forms' permutations beyond their superficial similarities of brevity, beginning our readings with the prose poem's rise in 19th-century France before studying various modern and contemporary developments. We'll practice the art of interpretation on texts that are often obscure and cryptic, and consider ideas of genre as we place these forms in dialogue with each other and with other literary forms. Readings may include texts by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Stein, Kafka, Hemingway, Toomer, Borges, Davis, Atwood, Edson, Simic, Oates, Mullen, Bouvier, and many other writers, as well as contextual materials. Please note that Short Forms is not a creative writing course, and that the word "short" should not suggest a light workload.

ENGL 101.14 WF 12:00-1:15 Mr. Harmon

English 101a. Deception: Some Truths About Lies

Narratives told by someone who can't be trusted invite readers to explore the ambiguous border between truths and lies. An author's perceptions may differ from those of the first-person narrator—the "I"—who tells the story, and that discrepancy opens up intriguing psychological space. "Good readers read the lines, and better readers read the spaces," the novelist John Barth has written. This section of English 101 will analyze both words and spaces—both what is said and what is unspoken or unspeakable. We'll investigate a rogues' gallery of unreliable narrators who bring varying degrees of mendacity, self-aggrandizement, and self-deception to the stories they tell. Authors may include Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Lydia Davis, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Patrick McGrath, Vladimir Nabokov, Tim O'Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Sylvia Plath, Salman Rushdie, Charles Simic, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Students will write both analytical and imaginative responses to the texts.

ENGL 101.15 TR 12:00-1:15 Ms. Mark

English 101a. Writing From Experience

This course will look at the various ways authors imagine life experience. The required reading for this course may come from authors James Baldwin, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Dana Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, George Orwell, Art Speigelman, Dylan Thomas, and Sarah Vowel. Students will be asked to participate in an on-going narrative project that explores narrative writing from various experimental stances.

ENGL 101.16 TR 10:30-11:45 Ms. Nichols

English 101a. American Gothic

Are Gothic stories, novels, and films purely frightening and entertaining or do they also reflect and critique ideologies of American individual and cultural identity? Taking Matthew Lewis's The Monk as our template of the traditional Gothic novel in England, we will examine American Renaissance writers' reinvention of the genre to articulate new, distinctly American concerns. Texts include those by Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, Gilman, and O'Connor. We conclude with an examination of the contemporary American Gothic situation as illustrated by Denis Johnson's recent collection of short stories Jesus' Son.

ENGL 101.17 WF 1:30-2:45 Ms. Rose

English 101a. Dreamwork

In this course, we will use the medium of dreams to understand the processes of reading, writing and interpretation. We will engage with philosophical, aesthetic and political questions about the formations of culture and identity that dreams provoke. Not only a seedbed for fantasy and creative thought, the language of dreams serves as the basis for ideological formations and the making of the world throughout the ages. The readings will draw from a variety of genres, media, periods and disciplines in an effort to understand how much dreams can inform and structure our waking practices of thinking and writing.

EMGL 101.18 TR 9:00-10:15 Ms. Park

English 101a. Evidence and the Literary Imagination

Evidence: a whorl fingerprint visible in a dust of carbon powder, mud caked into a shoe's tread, a newly painted wall—smudged. From Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes to the crack team of CBS's television hit CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the detectives of popular representation gather and, ultimately, explain evidence—expert powers of observation allow them to glean the solution to which all "clues" have lead. This course will consider representations of evidence (details, objects, documents meant to prove something), turning first to literary and popular texts that authorize the reading of evidence by characters who are "professionals," then considering texts that make radical demands of readers to interpret evidence for ourselves, often pushing us to seek solutions to crimes when none are forthcoming within the text itself. For example, we will read Gertrude Stein's short detective story Blood on the Dining Room Floor, a collage of unsolved, real-life crimes against women; Evidence, Luc Sante's collection of New York City police crime scene photos made between 1914 and 1918; Raymond Chandler's long-on-clues, short-on-solutions Philip Marlowe mystery The Big Sleep; and Tim O'Brien's historical novel In the Lake of the Woods, which links an American politician's participation in the My Lai massacre as a soldier in Vietnam to his wife's unexplained disappearance decades later. Finally, we will look at the scrapbooks—fascinating, homespun collections of evidence clipped from newspapers and pamphlets—Virginia Woolf compiled in preparation to write her anti-war essay Three Guineas. We will ask: What is evidence? Who may interpret it and to what end? As the course progresses, we will write several essays that require sophisticated arguments built on our own careful use of evidence drawn from analysis of course texts, archival materials, and personal repositories we will construct throughout the semester.

ENGL 101.20 TR 3:10-4:25 Ms. Rumbarger

Geography 111a. Earth Science and Environmental Justice

(Same as ESCI 111) Exploration of the roles that race, gender, and class play in contemporary environmental issues, and the geology that underlies them. Examination of the power of governments, corporations, and science to influence the physical and human environment. We critique the traditional environmental movement, study cases of environmental racism, and appreciate how basic geological knowledge can assist communities in creating healthful surroundings. Examples come from urban and rural settings in the United States and abroad and are informed by feminist analysis.

GEOG 111.01 TR 1:30-2:45 Ms. Schneiderman

French 183a. Fashion and Modernity

In this Freshman Seminar we consider the historical and cultural evolution of fashion in France from the end of the Old Regime to the 20th century. While to many, the term fashion implies surface, frivolity, and deception, in this course we analyze fashion in relation to some of the most important themes of modernity — social mobility, colonialism, industrialization, consumerism, and mass culture, for example — and place the discourses of fashion in a social context. By reading literary texts in conjunction with historical documents, illustrations, and classic works of fashion theory, we show how fashion can be used as a crucial prism through which to understand French culture. The course is taught in English. All works are read in translation.

FREN 183.01 TR 3:10-4:25 Ms. Hiner

German 101a. Vampires, Lunatics, and Cyborgs: Exploring the Uncanny Recesses of the Romantic Consciousness

From the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm to E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Nutcracker and the King of Mice," German Romanticism has populated the modern imagination with a multitude of uncanny creations. This course examines the evolution of figures such as vampires, witches, golems, mad scientists, and cyborgs through German culture from their origins in the 19th century to their afterlife in the present, in literature and film. In addition, we pursue their reception and development outside of Germany, for instance in Disney's versions of Grimms' tales and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. Readings and discussions in English.

GERM 101.01 MW 12:00-1:15 Mr. Schreiber

History 116a. "The Dark Ages" c. 400 - 900

(Same as MRST 116) Was early medieval Europe really Dark? In reality, this was a period of tremendous vitality and ferment, witnessing the growth of Germanic kingdoms, the high point of the Byzantine Empire, the rise of the papacy and monasticism, and the birth of Islam. This course examines a rich variety of sources that illuminate the unfortunately named "dark ages," showing moments of both conflict and synthesis that arose from the meeting of Classical, Christian, and "barbarian" cultures.

HIST 116.01 TR 3:10-4:25 Ms. Bisaha

History 160a. American Moments: Readings in U.S. History

This course explores some of the pivotal moments in American history, from the late colonial era to the late 20th century. While roughly chronological, the course is not a survey. Rather, it focuses on selected events, people, and texts that illuminate particularly crucial periods in America's past. Topics include the process of nation building, racial and ethnic relations, gender roles, protest movements and the growth of the regulatory state, the Cold War, and the paradox of class formation in a "classless" society.

HIST 160.01 TR 1:30-2:45 Mr. Brigham
HIST 160.02 TR 9:00-10:15 Mr. Merrell

Italian 181a. With Dante in Hell

A man claims to have spent three days traveling through the underworld where unrepentant bad people undergo unending punishment. Where does the idea of Hell come from? Does it have relevance today? We read attentively Dante's Inferno, his carefully written and troubling account of that trip, bearing in mind his sources and alert to possible contradictions. Frequent short writing assignments.

ITAL 181.01 TR 1:30-2:45 Mr. Ahern

Mathematics 131a. Numbers, Shape, Chance, and Change

What is the stuff of mathematics? What do mathematicians do? Fundamental concepts from arithmetic, geometry, probability, and calculus are explored, emphasizing the relations among these diverse areas, their internal logic, their beauty, and how they come together to form a unified discipline. As a counterpoint, we also discuss the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in describing a stunning range of phenomena from the natural and social worlds. Prerequisites: at least three years of high school mathematics. Two 50-minute lectures and one 50-minute discussion per week.

MATH 131.01 MWF 12:00-12:50 Mr. Steinhorn

Media Studies 180a. Transformations of the Word

What is the relationship between medium and message in verbal works of art? Does the medium in which a work of literature is created or received influence its meaning? Does it matter whether we hear a story told, read it in a book, encounter it in a personal letter, or find it on-line? Is the story the same in each case, or do the media through which it is transmitted react on the story itself and change it for the listener, reader, or browser? How has the relationship between visual and verbal means of communications changed over time? These questions will be asked in relation to a number of literary works from various periods of history. Works studied may include the following: Pindar's Odes, Plato's Phaedrus, the Bible, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Gulliver's Travels, Tristram Shandy, lyric poems by Frost, Heaney, and others. There will be some reading in secondary sources such as "The Consequences of Literacy" by J. Goody and I. Watt and "The Emergence of Print Culture in the West" by Elizabeth Eisenstein. Students will write (or compose) in various verbal media.

MEDS 180.01 TR 10:30-11:45 Mr. DeMaria

Medieval and Renaissance Studies 116a. "The Dark Ages" c. 400 – 900

(Same as HIST 116) Was early medieval Europe really Dark? In reality, this was a period of tremendous vitality and ferment, witnessing the growth of Germanic kingdoms, the high point of the Byzantine Empire, the rise of the papacy and monasticism, and the birth of Islam. This course examines a rich variety of sources that illuminate the unfortunately named "dark ages," showing moments of both conflict and synthesis that arose from the meeting of Classical, Christian, and "barbarian" cultures.

MRST 116.01 TR 3:10-4:25 Ms. Bisaha

Philosophy 106a. Philosophy and Contemporary Issues

Philosophical investigation of a range of positions on current issues such as abortion, pornography, affirmative action, gay rights, distributive justice, animal rights, and freedom of speech.

PHIL 106.02 MW 1:30-2:45 Mr. Kelly

Women's Studies 160a. Issues in Feminism: Bodies and Texts

An introduction to issues in feminism with a focus on the body, the representation of the body, and textuality. Possible issues may include reproductive rights, pornography, anorexia, prostitution, women in popular cultures, and the female voice. Specific attention is paid to the intersection of race, class, and gender. The course may include a component of body work.

WMST 160.01 TR 3:10-4:25 Ms. Hart

SPRING SECTIONS

American Culture 181b. The Criminal and the Carceral

Possibly the most cherished national value of the United States — and the principle that most swiftly enchants both native and immigrant to celebrate themselves as American citizens — is the notion of personal freedom. Yet the recent announcement by justice experts that the U.S. prison population threatens to exceed 2 million inmates suggests that there is an unsavory and desperate underside of U.S. freedom and that in the grand design of U.S. institutions lurks an imperative to confine its citizens as well as liberate them. The criminal and the carceral, however, serve as our muse. In addition to carefully considering the reigning critique of the burgeoning prison-industrial complex in the first portion of the course, we meditate on Enlightenment penological theory and the history of U.S. incarceration to better understand why our society has embraced the prison as a punishment practice and how it goes about administering the institution's discipline. The second portion features a study of literary and documentary representations of the prison experience. We explore how writers and other creative artists have imagined or personally negotiated the challenge of confinement. The third section offers additional meditations on the workings of the justice system and culminates in an exploration of how the U.S. increasingly remakes itself into a carceral society wherein governmental politics, public space, and popular television reveal the extent to which policing and social control have become the defining features of our national culture. In short, this inquiry into the nature of American justice goes beyond critical analysis of literary texts toward a broader understanding of cultural history, cultural change, and cultural ideology.

AMCL 181.51 TR 3:10-4:25 Mr. Simpson

Economics 111b. Economic Crises

This course studies economic crises through the prisms of theory and history. It examines closely the current food and energy crisis in developing countries and the U.S. credit crunch, as well as earlier episodes of prolonged economic contraction and instability, including the Great Depression and the Asian Financial Crisis. The differential impact of economic crises by race, class, and gender is a focus.

ECON 111.51 MW 12:00-1:15 Ms. Ali

English 101b. Journalism

A writing course built around the presentation in class of good models of journalism covering a wide range of genres: reportage, long-form magazine writing, Talk of the Town, writing for the Web, interviews, etc. Students enrolling in the course are encouraged to read beforehand The New New Journalism (edited by Robert S. Boynton).

ENGL 101.51 TR 3:10-4:25 Mr. Kumar

English 101b. Beneath the Apocalyptic Landscape

This course will explore characters caught in the dreamscape of violence and apocalyptic visions that is perhaps unique to the American history and culture, from slavery to skinheads to school shootings. We'll examine the concept—coined by rock critic Greil Marcus—of Old Weird America, a folkloric history that has spawned murder ballads, the music of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and a wide range of literary work, including poetry by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Lucille Clifton, and Etheridge Knight; stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Christine Schutt, and Denis Johnson. Longer works may include novels by William Faulkner, Gayle Jones, Robert Stone, William Vollmann, Hunter Thompson, and the graphic artist Lynda Barry.

ENGL 101.52 TR 12:00-1:15 Mr. Means

English 101b. Writing from Experience

This course will look at the various ways authors imagine life experience. The required reading for this course may come from authors James Baldwin, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Dana Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, George Orwell, Art Spiegelman, Dylan Thomas, and Sarah Vowel. Students will be asked to participate in an on-going narrative project that explores narrative writing from various experimental stances.

ENGL 101.53 TR 10:30-11:45 Ms. Nichols

English 184b. New Voices, Old Stories, New Immigrant Jewish Writers

(Same as JWST 184) American History is, in some ways, the story of immigrants, and one of the first immigrant groups to publish their stories were Jews, particularly those from Eastern Europe. American Jewish writers established the immigrant literary scene that today has become multifaceted and multicultural. In this class, we read the newest, most popular young writers to emerge from the recent Eastern European Jewish diaspora, and compare them to their classic forerunners. We examine the themes of assimilation, religious awakening, and responses to the Holocaust by members of the Second and Third Generation. New texts include Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, and Lara Vapnyar's There Are Jews in My House; older voices include those of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Anzia Yezierska.

ENGL 184.51 MW 9:00-10:15 Ms. Friedman

History 161b. History, Narrative, Fiction: Telling Stories on America's Frontier

This course explores the narrative strategies for telling about the past, including those used by contemporary participants, professional historians, popular non-fiction writers, and novelists. How do we plot historical events? Where do we mark beginnings and ends, and how does that shape our understanding of what happened? What attention do authors give to environment, setting, and character? Course participants read an array of narratives, conduct research, and practice writing, as we explore key episodes in the history of the Western United States between the 1830s and the 1930s. Major emphasis is on cultural and military conflicts, land and natural resources, and environmental history.

HIST 161.51 TR 9:00-10:15 Ms. Edwards

Jewish Studies 184b. New Voices, Old Stories, New Immigrant Jewish Writers

(Same as ENGL 184) American History is, in some ways, the story of immigrants, and one of the first immigrant groups to publish their stories were Jews, particularly those from Eastern Europe. American Jewish writers established the immigrant literary scene that today has become multifaceted and multicultural. In this class, we read the newest, most popular young writers to emerge from the recent Eastern European Jewish diaspora, and compare them to their classic forerunners. We examine the themes of assimilation, religious awakening, and responses to the Holocaust by members of the Second and Third Generation. New texts include Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, and Lara Vapnyar's There Are Jews in My House; older voices include those of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Anzia Yezierska.

JWST 184.51 MW 9:00-10:15 Ms. Friedman

Media Studies 182b. The Medium is the Message

Is a picture better than a thousand words? What about a video? As Marshall McLuhan contended more than 40 years ago, "the medium is the message," by which he meant that media does not just deliver "content," but substantially modifies it—and society and each of us in the process. This course sets out to re-examine McLuhan's famous dictum through the study of both older and newer media. In addition to writing academic essays, we will explore and assess different forms of media (blogs, wikis, online chats, video, etc.) as other potential venues for academic discourse. As part of our study of writing in and through media, we will also use new text analysis tools to analyze our own writing.

MEDS 182.51 TBA Mr. Schneider

Russian Studies 171b. Russia and the Short Story

In this course we read and discuss a number of classic short stories in English by such Russian masters of the genre as Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and Olesha.

RUSS 171.51 MR 4:35-5:50 Mr. Klimoff

Women's Studies 160b. Issues in Feminism: Bodies and Texts

WMST 160.51 TR 3:10-4:25 Ms. Zlotnik

Dean of Freshmen

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