ENROLL

Ross Elfline

Beyond surveying the rich history of arts by LGBTQA+ individuals, this course takes as its object of study the ways in which the arts have been used to question, undermine, and subvert the gendered and sexual norms of dominant cultures—in short, to queer them. In so doing, such visual and performative practices offer new, alternative models of living and acting in the world based on liberatory politics and aesthetics. This course will consider topics such as: censorship of queer artists; art of the AIDS crisis; activist performance; the sexual politics of public space; and queer intersections of race, class and gender in visual art among others.

Prerequisite: Any one art history course

Extra Time Required

Ken Abrams

This course will examine key developments in Czech visual art and architecture from the early medieval to the contemporary periods. Slide-based lectures will be supplemented by visits to representative monuments, art collections, and museums in Prague.

OCS Cross Cultural Psychology in Prague

Martha A Wolff

Three remarkable royal women (Queen Isabel of Castile, Anne of France, and Archduchess Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands), linked by blood, marriage, and shifting dynastic alliances, provide a lens to examine patronage networks and collecting culture in France, Spain and the Netherlands circa 1500, at the transition from the late middle ages to the Renaissance. Isabel of Castile was exceptional as a sovereign queen; for most royal women power was indirect, delegated, and carefully masked, while the requirement to produce an heir was paramount. The course will consider the interplay of these constraints and the works of art these princesses commissioned and lived with by looking at topics like palace design, inventories of royal collections and the hierarchies of luxury arts they reveal, portraiture as an expression of dynastic piety and marriage politics, and the new prominence of painting as an independent and collectable medium.

Prerequisite: Any one art history course

Extra Time Required

Palmar Alvarez-Blanco

This course offers an introduction to Spanish art from el Greco to the present. Classes are taught in some of the finest museums and churches of Spain, including the Prado Museum, the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Toledo Cathedral in Toledo, and the Church of Santo Tomé.

Prerequisite: Spanish 205

Requires participation in OCS Program: Spanish Studies in Madrid

David T Van Zanten

Architecture in our culture has become the art of solving spatial problems with large-scale constructions, at first in drawings but now as patterns on computer screens. This course examines four aspects of this Western building conceptualization during the last two hundred years, beginning with the exploration of it as the art of building and ending in coding--in our digital world today. We will focus on four fundamental moments in this historical development: 1) the emergence of the architect as a new exploring, reasoning figure in European culture in the early nineteenth-century (Labrouste, Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc); 2) transforming into a broad conceiver of whole cities facing the demands of the late-nineteenth century urban “explosion” (Haussmann, Burnham); 3) but rapidly progressing to the abstraction of “building art,” a web of machine-like systems during the first half of the twentieth century (F. L. Wright, Le Corbusier, Hilberseimer); 4) to now sink—with struggles and false-starts—into our new computerized world.

Prerequisite: Any one art history course

Extra Time Required

Kathleen Ryor

This course will examine the history and aesthetics of the tea ceremony in Japan (chanoyu).  It will focus on the types of objects produced for use in the Japanese tea ceremony from the fifteenth century through the present. Themes to be explored include: the relationship of social status and politics to the development of chanoyu; the religious dimensions of the tea ceremony; gender roles of tea practitioners; nationalist appropriation of the tea ceremony and its relationship to the mingei movement in the twentieth century; and the international promotion of the Japanese tea ceremony post-WWII.

Prerequisite: Requires concurrent registration in Studio Arts 236

Extra Time Required, requires concurrent registration in ARTS 236

Baird Jarman

This course considers the history of academic campuses in the United States, using Carleton as a detailed case study. We will examine campus design in relation to social history, treating campuses as complex educational districts reshaped over time to adapt to changing institutional priorities. Topics will include the founding of sectarian colleges, land-grant universities, and state normal schools; collegiate gothic and modernist design; the G.I. Bill® and other education policies; beaux-arts planning; sustainability initiatives; etc. Utilizing primary documents in the college archives, students will research Carleton’s planning history, culminating in a spring-term exhibition at the Perlman Teaching Museum.

Prerequisite: Two Art History courses, or instructor consent

Extra Time Required

Jay Beck

Sophomore Priority. Extra Time required for screenings

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: CAMS 110.WL0 (Synonym 61949)

Dimitrios Pavlounis

Extra Time Evening Screenings

Jay Beck

This course presents the broader field of Sound Studies, its debates and issues. Drawing on a diverse set of interdisciplinary perspectives, the seminar explores the range of academic work on sound to examine the relationship between sound and listening, sound and perception, sound and memory, and sound and modern thought. Topics addressed include but are not limited to sound technologies and industries, acoustic perception, sound and image relations, sound in media, philosophies of listening, sound semiotics, speech and communication, voice and subject formation, sound art, the social history of noise, and hearing cultures.

Prerequisite: Cinema and Media Studies 110 or instructor permission

Lei Yang

This course explores Chinese traditional culture in advanced Mandarin Chinese. The long history and rich culture in premodern China have produced a precious legacy that has been widely inherited by contemporary China and significantly impacted the modern society. To better understand present-day China and the Chinese language, it is crucial for advanced learners to track the evolution back while acquiring higher-level vocabulary and structures. Lesson topics center on literature, language, writing, and so on. Many of our texts are from ancient Chinese stories (Mencius, Brotherhood, Language of Flowers, Dream of Red Mansions, etc.)

Prerequisite: Chinese 206 or equivalent

Constance Walker

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Audre Lorde.  In this course we will explore how poets use form, tone, sound, imagery, rhythm, and subject matter to create works of astonishing imagination, beauty, and power. In discussions, Moodle posts, and essay assignments we’ll analyze individual works by poets from Sappho to Amanda Gorman (and beyond); there will also be daily recitations of poems, since the musicality is so intrinsic to the meaning.

Michael Kowalewski

An exploration of the remarkable variety and evolution of the American short story from its emergence in the early nineteenth century to the present. Authors read will range from Washington Irving to Octavia Butler and Jhumpa Lahiri. We will examine how formal aspects such as narration, dialogue, style and character all help shape this genre over time. While our central focus will be on literary artistry, we will also consider examples of pulp fiction, graphic short stories, flash fiction and some cinematic adaptations of stories.

Pierre Hecker

Cross-listed with English 244

Cross-listed with ENGL 244.00

Jessica Leiman

Samuel Johnson declared novels to be “written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life.” This course explores what sort of education the novel offered its readers during a time when fiction was considered a source of valuable lessons and also an agent of corruption. We will read a selection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature, seduction fiction, and novels of manners, considering how these works engage with early educational theories, notions of male and female conduct, and concerns about the didactic and sensational possibilities of fiction. Authors include Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Charles Dickens.

Susan Jaret McKinstry

Kofi Owusu

We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.

Michael Kowalewski

Elizabeth McKinsey

An important preoccupation of nineteenth century America was the nature of democracy and the proper balance of individualism and the social good. An experiment in government, democracy also raised new questions about gender, class, and race. Citizenship was contested; roles in the new, expanding nation were fluid; abolition and emancipation, the movement for women's rights, industrialization all caused ferment and anxiety. The course will explore the way these issues were imagined in fiction by such writers as Cooper, Hawthorne, Maria Sedgwick, Stowe, Tourgee, Henry Adams, Twain, Gilman, and Chesnutt.

Pierre Hecker

Cross-listed with ENGL 144

Arnab Chakladar

This course will examine Anglophone fiction in the Caribbean from the late colonial period through our contemporary moment. We will examine major developments in form and language as well as the writing of identity, personal and (trans)national. We will read works by canonical writers such as V.S Naipaul, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as by lesser known contemporary writers.

Nancy Cho

Prerequisite: One English Foundations course and one prior 6 credit English course

Not open to first year students.

Kofi Owusu

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course or instructor permission

Constance Walker

"How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage, and his contemporary world?"--Heaney. We will read the major works and literary criticism of the two great twentieth-century Irish poets W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, studying their art in relation to their place and time. 

Prerequisite: English 295 and one 300 level English course

Cathy Yandell

How to transcribe the self? How is a self created, examined, or reinvented through storytelling? Is cultural context inextricable from self-writing? Our inquiry will be informed by readings from Montaigne, Descartes, Maryse Condé, and the controversial contemporary author Édouard Louis; a film by Agnès Varda; an autofictional graphic novel; and songs by the Franco-Rwandan singer Gaël Faye. During the course of the term, students will also produce their own autobiographical/autofictional projects. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels, and coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

Prerequisite: French 204 or the equivalent

Cross-listed with FREN 357

Cherif Keita

This course will look at the presence of France and its capital Paris in the imaginary landscape of a number of prominent African writers, filmmakers and musicians such as Bernard Dadié (Côte d' Ivoire), Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), Calixthe Beyala (Cameroun), Alain Mabanckou (Congo-Brazzaville), Salif Keïta (Mali) and others. The history of Franco-African relations will be used as a background for our analysis of these works. Conducted in French. This course is part of the OCS winter break French Program in Senegal, involving two linked courses in fall and winter terms. This courses is the first in the sequence, students must register for French 246 winter term.

Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 and acceptance in OCS Winter Break French Program in Senegal

Cathy Yandell

How to transcribe the self? How is a self created, examined, or reinvented through storytelling? Is cultural context inextricable from self-writing? Our inquiry will be informed by readings from Montaigne, Descartes, Maryse Condé, and the controversial contemporary author Édouard Louis; a film by Agnès Varda; an autofictional graphic novel; and songs by the Franco-Rwandan singer Gaël Faye. During the course of the term, students will also produce their own autobiographical/ autofictional projects. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels, coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 or instructor permission

Kiley Kost

Many people are familiar with the fairy tales collected and published by the Brothers Grimm and have seen iterations of such stories in animated Disney films and live-action reboots. In this class, taught in English, we will critically examine folktales, consider their role in shaping societal standards and how they spread specific values across cultures. We will study the origins of Grimms’ fairy tales before discussing their larger role across media and cultures. Our study of traditional German fairy tales will be informed by contemporary theoretical approaches including feminist theory, ecocriticism, psychology, and animal studies.

In Translation

Chie Tokuyama

This course offers an introduction to modern theories of art, with an emphasis on the origin of modern Japanese literature (1868-1945) and its newly cultivated aesthetic sensibilities. What are the defining characteristics of literature and what are its values in society? How is our aesthetic taste for beauty determined? The course surveys the field of modern Japanese literature, exploring the newly instituted notion of “literature” and the lofty role its pursuit of “beauty” played, as writers insisted, in enlightening the modern denizens living the age of uncertainty. Topics of inquires include how the shift in aesthetic taste for beauty correlated with the change in human relation to the natural world, and what moral implication it entailed. We explore answers to these questions by close-reading various cultural texts. Other readings will range historically and cross-culturally from premodern indigenous discourse on beauty to the nineteenth century Western aesthetic

Chie Tokuyama

This course explores Japanese popular media from an environmental perspective. The course incorporates prose, live-action films, and animation produced from 1868 through the present and attends to political, cultural, and philosophical events that ran parallel to developments and changes in the human relationship with the non-human world. By close-reading cultural texts produced in different eras, we will explore what options were available for rebuilding a sustainable environment in modern and contemporary Japan. Themes of exploration include modernization, internal colonization, gender, and industrial disaster, while familiarizing ourselves with an array of canonical authors and issues of global relevance. Students will develop skills in comprehending diverse cultural materials and outputting their integrated knowledge through in-class discussion and written assignments.

Prerequisite: Japanese 206 or equivalent

Jordan Rogers

Mistaken identities, forbidden trysts, and a healthy dose of punny humor characterize many of the comedic plays of the Roman playwright Plautus. In this class, we will read the entirety of one of Plautus’ plays, Mostellaria (“The Haunted House”) in Latin, while reading selections from several other plays in English. Along the way, we will stop to consider the influence of Greek comedies on Plautus’, the importance of comedic performance to Roman society, the settings and venues of these performances, and the social status of comedic performers, all to come to a fuller understanding of Plautus’ language and plays.

Prerequisite: Latin 204 or equivalent

Ronald Rodman

An introduction to the materials of western tonal music, with an emphasis on harmonic structure and syntax. It also covers basic harmonic syntax (through secondary dominants), two-voice counterpoint, melodic phrase structure, musical texture, and small musical forms, along with related theoretical concepts and vocabulary. Student work involves readings, listening assignments, analytical exercises, and short composition projects.

Prerequisite: Music 101, or permission of the instructor as assessed by a diagnostic exam administered at the start of the term.

Brooke Okazaki

Western music, especially classical music, is often called a “dead” genre. Part of this has to do with its associations with wealth, its aging audience base, and its seeming loftiness. But is this music really dead? In this class we will explore the history of Western music, with classical music as a starting point, but will examine the numerous ways music functions throughout cultures to tell different kinds of stories. We work from the assumption that no music (or art in general) is apolitical; because of this it behooves us to examine the ways the music of the past is deployed in service of social and political values today, whether it is to convince us to buy pizza or to incite revolution.

Mark S. Applebaum

This course will develop critical listening skills and an understanding of musical parameters through an introduction to select genres within the history of rock music. Our focus is on competing aesthetic tendencies and sub-cultural forces that shaped the music. The course includes discussions of rock’s significance in American culture and the minority communities that have enriched rock’s legacy as an expressively diverse form. Examined genres include blues, jazz, early rock ’n’ roll, folk rock, protest music, psychedelia, music of the British Invasion, punk, art rock, Motown, funk, hip hop, heavy metal, grunge, glitter, and disco. Lectures, readings, careful listening, and video screenings. Students will also argue for the best rock song of all time. 

Sarah N Lahasky

This course is designed to increase your awareness of the role of music as a part of social, political, and economic life. While popular music consumption for entertainment is one interaction that you might have had with music, there are myriad other meanings and uses for music in the United States and around the world. Some of these uses and meanings are obviously apparent to the average listener, and others are less so. Throughout the course, we will be exploring a variety of ways that people use, engage, and identify with music from various regions. The course is organized geographically, beginning with the US/Western Europe and then moving to parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Each week, we will focus on particular themes related to “traditional,” classical, or popular music to analyze in the context of our geographic case studies. Throughout the course, you will have the opportunity to apply concepts from class to your own musical case study. The culminating course project will consist of an ethnography of your chosen case study. No musical experience necessary.

Sophomore Priority

Sarah N Lahasky

Throughout history, people have relocated for a variety of reasons, both voluntarily and forcibly. What sorts of consequences do mass movements of people have on cultural practices? This course will examine the legacy of the slave trade with relation to African-influenced music developments throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. We will first consider the nuances of West African music practices and beliefs before and during the slave trade. Then, we will explore a variety of sacred and secular traditions that developed in the New World as a result of the African Diaspora, including spirituals, the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and hip hop in North America; tango, blocos afro, cumbia, and candombe in South America; and Santería, reggae, timba, rara, and steel pan in the Caribbean. As part of this exploration, we will consider difficult questions, such as what is “black music”?; What ethical considerations must we think about in relation to who can/should play black music?; and What sorts of similarities and differences exist between African-influenced music styles in the Americas, and why? Lastly, we will consider how music in Africa has changed in more recent times due to a return of African-Americans back to their ancestral roots as well as other points of contact between the Americas and Africa, especially in relation to genres like Afrobeat, highlife, and gumbe. No previous musical experience required.

Anna Dotlibova

An introduction to the names, quotations, and events that every Russian knows--knowledge which is essential to understanding Russian literature, history, and culture of the last two centuries. We will study the works of Russian writers (Griboedov and Pushkin, Leskov and Dostoevsky), composers (Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-­Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky), artists (Briullov, Ivanov, the Itinerants) and actors (Mochalov, Shchepkin) in the context of social thought and the social movements of the nineteenth century. Conducted in Russian.

Prerequisite: Russian 205 or permission of the instructor.

Jorge Brioso

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Jorge Brioso

An excellent opportunity to brush up your Spanish while learning about current issues in Spain and Latin America. The class meets only once a week for an hour. Class requirements include reading specific sections of Spain's leading newspaper, El País, everyday on the internet (El País), and then meeting once a week to exchange ideas over coffee with a small group of students like yourself.

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Humberto Huergo

This course serves as a bridge between beginning (204-208) and advanced courses (220-300) in the Department of Spanish. Its main objective is to improve your written and oral skills by looking at some of the best examples of the graphic novel in Spain in recent years, including: Vida y muerte de Lorca (biography), Las Meninas (art history), Yo, asesino (detective novel), Homenaje a Cataluña (Spanish Civil War), Náufragos (urban tales of Madrid and Barcelona), Ardalén (autobiography), and others. Students will be expected to write several short compositions and to give oral presentations applying specific grammar skills in the context of texts and paintings examined in class.

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Jorge Brioso

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above

Extra Time Required

Andrew Carlson

A study of significant American plays from the early twentieth century to the present, including playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Alice Childress, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Lauren Yee. We will read plays from a theatrical lens, discussing them as blueprints for performance by examining their structure, characters, language, and theatricality. We will also discuss how these plays are in conversation with contextual historical events and notions of American identity.