ENROLL

Zaki Haidar

In this course we will study representations of the environment in modern Arab culture, across the media of film and literature. In our approach to Egyptian culture we will study depictions of the exemplary space of the cityscape and the village, and their entanglement with myths of nation. In the film and fiction of North Africa and the Persian Gulf we will explore representations of the desert, and a literary and visual approach that defies the typical casting of arid spaces as barren. We will explore how works from Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon envision the relationship of their societies to the mountain and sea. Through our close study of Arab fictions we will think about how environments have shaped those societies, and how members of those societies have made claims of their own about and upon their surroundings. In translation, no Arabic required. All course readings will be in English. 

In translation

Yaron Klein

This course is an exploration of the world of the Thousand and One Nights, the most renowned Arabic literary work of all time. The marvelous tales spun by Shahrazad have captured and excited the imagination of readers and listeners--both Arab and non-Arab--for centuries. In class, we will read in Arabic, selections from the Nights, and engage some of the scholarly debates surrounding this timeless work. We will discuss the question of its origin in folklore and popular culture and the mystery of its "authorship," as well as the winding tale of its reception, adaptation and translation. Readings and class discussions will be in both Arabic and English.

Prerequisite: Arabic 206 or equivalent

Jessica Keating

Ross Elfline

Kathleen Ryor

Since the tenth century in China, a tension emerges between art created as a means of self expression and works which were intended to display social status and political power and to convey conventional values. This course concentrates on the primary site of this tension, the art of painting. We will explore such issues as the influence of Confucian and Daoist philosophy on painting and calligraphy, the changing perception of nature and the natural in art, the politics of style, and the increasing dominance of poetry rather than narrative as a conceptual construct for painting.

Jessica Keating

Prerequisite: One Art History course or instructor permission

Baird Jarman

This course surveys the history of European architecture while emphasizing firsthand encounters with actual structures. Students visit outstanding examples of major transnational styles--including Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical and Modernist buildings--along with regionally specific styles, such as Spanish Plateresque, English Tudor and Catalan Modernisme. Cultural and technological changes affecting architectural practices are emphasized along with architectural theory, ranging from Renaissance treatises to Modernist manifestos. Students also visit buildings that resist easy classification and that raise topics such as spatial appropriation, stylistic hybridity, and political symbolism.

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS Architectural Studies Program

Requires participation in OCS Program: Architectural Studies in Europe

Baird Jarman

This course explores the theory and practice of cultural resource management by investigating how various architectural sites and urban historic districts operate. Students will consider cultural, financial, ethical and pedagogical aspects of contemporary tourism practices within a historical framework that roots the travel industry alongside religious pilgrimage customs and the aristocratic tradition of the Grand Tour. Interacting with professionals who help oversee architectural landmarks and archaeological sites, students will analyze and assess initiatives at various locations, ranging from educational programs and preservation plans to sustainability efforts and repatriation debates.

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS Architectural Studies Program

Participation in OCS Architectural Studies Program

Baird Jarman

This course uses metropolitan areas visited during the program as case studies in the history and contemporary practice of urban planning. Students will explore cities with the program director and with local architects and historians—as well as in groups on their own. Specific topics include the use of major international events, such as Olympic Games and World’s Fairs, as large-scale planning opportunities, the development of municipal housing programs, the reduction of automobile traffic and mass transit initiatives, the adaptive reuse of former industrial districts, the use of cultural institutions as civic anchors, and more.

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS Architectural Studies Program

Requires participation in OCS Program: Architectural Studies in Europe

Sara Cluggish

Through a discussion-based format, this course explores the nature of museums, the roles of contemporary curators, and the evolving functions of exhibitions. Theoretical investigations are complemented by practical, hands-on experiences. Working directly with artworks from the Carleton Art Collection, the group will prepare and execute an exhibition to be shown in the Perlman Teaching Museum. Students will conduct artist-specific research, draft interpretive text, formulate exhibition labels, and consider various exhibition formats. In the Fall 2018 seminar, students will create an exhibition that explores the roles text, symbols, and writing play when they are incorporated into visual art.

Prerequisite: Any one Art History course or instructor permission

Extra Time Required

Kathleen Ryor

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in China, unprecedented economic development and urbanization expanded the number of educated elite who used their wealth to both display their status and distinguish themselves as cultural leaders. As a result, this period experienced a boom in estate and garden building, art collecting and luxury consumption. This course will examine a wide range of objects from painting and calligraphy to furniture and ceramics within the context of domestic architecture of the late Ming dynasty. It will also examine the role of taste and social class in determining the style of art and architecture.

Jay Beck

Sophomore Priority. Extra Time required for screenings

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: CAMS 110.WL0 (Synonym 61966)

Dimitrios Pavlounis

Extra Time required. Evening Screenings.

Cecilia Cornejo

This course explores the relevance and influence of documentary films by closely examining the aesthetic concerns and ethical implications inherent in these productions. We study these works both as artistic undertakings and as documents produced within a specific time, culture, and ideology. Central to our understanding of the form are issues of technology, methodology, and ethics, which are examined thematically as well as chronologically. The course offers an overview of the major historical movements in documentary film along more recent works; it combines screenings, readings, and discussions with the goal of preparing students to both understand and analyze documentary films.

Extra Time Required, weekly evening in-person screenings Tuesdays

Dimitrios Pavlounis

As video games have emerged as a dominant cultural form, they have become deeply intertwined with broader cultural debates around identity. By analyzing a variety of specific games as well as the industry that creates them and the communities who play them, we will think through topics such as liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal capitalism, feminism, queerness, ethical design, the military-entertainment complex, GamerGate, and discourses of political correctness. This course will avoid categorizing games as having “positive” or “negative” social effects and will instead focus on how video games function as a window into issues of identity in U.S. culture.

Lei Yang

Through generic and historical analysis of the two-millennia long biographical tradition in Chinese historical writing, this project explores lives of heroes and heroines, including, but not limited to: dynastic founders, ministers, generals, poets, assassins, and exceptional women. In this introduction to premodern Chinese culture and literature, students will experience, in English translation, some of the most beautiful works of ancient Chinese literature from the second century BCE through the eighteenth century CE. No prior Chinese language study required.

In translation

Lin Deng

Were chopsticks originally eating utensils? Did ancient Chinese sleep on beds and sit on chairs? What did they wear? In this course, students will find answers to questions like those in a series of expository writings concerning various aspects of daily life in ancient Chinese society, while enhancing their proficiency in comprehending authentic materials and producing extended discourse on related topics through a variety of oral and written coursework. This course also provides a fair amount of exposure to common sources for historical studies of China, and thus expands students’ vocabulary and knowledge about Chinese history and archaeology.

Prerequisite: Chinese 206 or equivalent

Florencia Foxley

The terms “reboot,” “retelling,” and “adaptation” are all over TV and film. While some adaptations are praised for their creativity with the source material, others are panned. So what makes an adaptation good or bad? In this class, we will approach this question through Greek tragedy. We will read plays such as Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone, Medea, and the Oresteia in translation alongside films from around the world in order to understand how directors and writers relate these ancient works to their own settings and struggles, decade after decade.

Extra Time Required

Jessica Leiman

This course explores the history and form of the British novel, tracing its development from a strange, sensational experiment in the eighteenth century to a dominant literary genre today. Among the questions that we will consider: What is a novel? What makes it such a popular form of entertainment? How does the novel participate in ongoing conversations about family, sex, class, race, and nation? How did a genre once considered a source of moral corruption become a legitimate literary form? Authors include: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, and Jackie Kay.

George Shuffelton

This class will focus on three of the most popular and closely connected modes of narrative enjoyed by medieval audiences: the epic, the romance, and the saint's life. Readings, drawn primarily from the English and French traditions, will include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, and legends of St. Alexis and St. Margaret. We will consider how each narrative mode influenced the other, as we encounter warriors and lovers who suffer like saints, and saints who triumph like warriors and lovers. Readings will be in translation or highly accessible modernizations.

Pierre Hecker

An exploration of drama approached as literature and in performance. New digital resources enable us to take world-class productions from the National Theatre and elsewhere as our texts. Drawing examples both globally and across time, we will consider plays and recent productions in their historical and cultural contexts. Students will develop critical vocabularies, debate interpretations, and hone their interpretive and rhetorical skills in writing reviews and essays.

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.

George Shuffelton

When medieval writers imagined worlds beyond their own, what did they see?  This course will examine depictions of the afterlife, the East, and magical realms of the imagination. We will read romances, saints' lives, and a masterpiece of pseudo-travel literature that influenced both Shakespeare and Columbus, alongside contemporary theories of postcolonialism, gender and race. We will visit the lands of the dead and the undead, and compare gruesome punishments and heavenly rewards. We will encounter dog-headed men, Amazons, cannibals, armies devoured by hippopotami, and roasted geese that fly onto waiting dinner tables. Be prepared. Readings in Middle English and in modern translations.

Peter Balaam

Attempts to discern the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist come down, Emerson says, to a "practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?" This interdisciplinary course will investigate the works of the American Transcendentalist movement in its restless discontent with the conventional, its eclectic search for better ways of thinking and living. We will engage major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman alongside documents of the scientific, religious, and political changes that shaped their era and provoked their responses.

Susan Jaret McKinstry

Two exceptional groups of artists changed aesthetic and cultural history through their writings, art, politics, and lives. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began in 1847 when art students united to create “direct and serious and heartfelt” work; the Bloomsbury group began with Cambridge friends sharing their insistence on aesthetic lives. Critics said the PRB “extolled fleshliness as the supreme end of poetic and pictorial art,” and the Bloomsbury Group “painted in circles, lived in squares and loved in triangles.” We will study Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Millais, William Morris, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa and Clive Bell.

Nancy Cho

Michael Kowalewski

Extra Time required.

Arnab Chakladar

Jessica Leiman

This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course

Constance Walker

Mass protests, police brutality, reactionary politicians, imprisoned journalists, widespread unemployment, and disease were all features of the Romantic era in Britain as well as our own time. We will explore how its writers brilliantly advocate for empathy, liberty, and social justice in the midst of violence and upheaval. Readings will include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and their contemporaries.

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course

Cathy Yandell

What can a body do? How does it mean? Cultural attitudes elicit distinct responses to this question, and French-speaking cultures in France, North Africa, and West Africa produce particular responses, as do gendered and differently abled bodies. At the same time, isn’t every body like every other body, but different? Through literature, cultural readings, podcasts, and film, this course will examine various aspects of the human body in francophone culture, including gender, athletics, manual labor, artistic expression, sexuality, dance, and “personal development.” Taught in French.

Prerequisite: French 204 or the equivalent

Sandra Rousseau

Racisé, transclasse, personne valide, female gaze are all concepts that have emerged recently in the Francophone world even though they reflect experiences that have existed for a very long time. In this class we will work through such concepts and explore how central they are to the contemporary Francophone world. Through theoretical texts and cultural artefacts (films, songs, BD, literature) from Morocco, France, Belgium, Senegal, and other spaces, this class seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the issues that animate the French-speaking world today.

Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 or instructor permission

Juliane Schicker

The course introduces students to the joys and challenges of reading short German fictional and non-fictional texts of various genres from three centuries, including fairy tales, aphorisms, short stories, novellas, tweets, essays, and newspaper articles. We will read slowly and with an eye to grammar and vocabulary building, while also concentrating on developing an understanding of German cultural history. Texts and class discussions will be in German.

Prerequisite: German 204 or equivalent

Juliane Schicker

In this course, offered in conjunction with the Christopher Light Lectureship, we will familiarize ourselves with the work of contemporary German author Fatma Aydemir, focussing particularly on her publications that deal with questions of migration and Heimat. We will read and discuss several fictional and nonfictional texts, participate in a creative nonfiction workshop and other events with Aydemir herself, and exhibit final projects at a public event.

Prerequisite: German 204 or equivalent or instructor consent

Noboru Tomonari

Introduction to canonical authors in modern Japanese manga in the original with exposure to a variety of themes and styles. Some practice in critical analysis.

Prerequisite: Japanese 206 or the equivalent

William North

This course offers students an introduction to post-classical Latin (250-1450) through readings in prose and poetry drawn from a variety of genres and periods. Students will also gain experience with medieval Latin paleography and codicology through occasional workshops in Special Collections.

Prerequisite: Latin 204 or equivalent, Latin placement exam or instructor's permission

Seth Peabody

This class introduces students to the various theoretical frameworks and the many approaches scholars can use when analyzing a text (whether this text is a film, an image, a literary piece or a performance). What do words like ‘structuralism,’ ‘ecocriticism,’ 'cultural studies,' and ‘postcolonial studies’ refer to? Most importantly, how do they help us understand the world around us? This class will be organized around interdisciplinary theoretical readings and exercises in cultural analysis.

Prerequisite: At least one 200- or 300-level course in Literary/Artistic Analysis (in any language) or instructor permission

Sarah N Lahasky

A survey of American music with particular attention to the interaction of the folk, popular, and classical realms. No musical experience required.

Justin London

Justin London

An investigation into the nature of musical sounds and the way they are combined to form rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and form. Topics include the nature of musical pitch, the structure of musical scales and their influence on melody, chords and their interval content, the complexity of rhythmic patterns, and chromatic harmony and modulation. Student work includes building a musical instrument, programming a drum machine, writing computer code to create harmonies and timbres, and an extended music analysis project.

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

Brooke Okazaki

This class expands students’ understanding of Western music by concentrating on the social ecosystem of performers, musicians, and consumer-listeners of both past and present. Students will explore broad themes in music history, such as concepts of sound, materiality, religion, politics, embodiment, and narrative. Through a variety of assignments including listening analyses, creative responses, and a final project, students will develop critical thinking, research, and communication skills to help them be successful in their various musical endeavors.

Prerequisite: Ability to read Western Music Notation recommended

Sarah N Lahasky

This course is designed to increase your awareness of musical styles in Latin America within particular social, economic, and political contexts. We will cover topics related to popular, folkloric, classical, and indigenous musics spanning from Mexico to South America's Southern Cone. The course will include elements of performance and dance instruction in addition to a critical examination of lived experiences across the region. No previous musical experience is necessary.

Brooke Okazaki

Over the decades, video game music has evolved from simple beeps and boops into a genre that has garnered millions of fans worldwide. This course traces the history of video game music aesthetics and technology. We will consider how it relates to a variety of musical traditions and engages with broader social issues. We will learn to listen for loops, styles, structures, and function in games via direct engagement with primary sources: the games themselves. The course culminates in the practical application of knowledge via a creative project. 

Prerequisite: Music 110 and/or Music 204

Humberto Huergo

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

Silvia Lopez

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or proficiency

Not open to seniors

Humberto Huergo

Muslims conquered Spain in 711 and lived in the country roughly until 1614. This course will examine the Islamic origins of Spain from a variety of disciplines, including literature, religion, history, and art history. Topics covered include:Hispano-Arabic literature, the fall of Granada, the repression of Moriscos under Philip II, aljamiado literature (literature written in Spanish with Arabic characters), the expulsion of Moriscos, and the diaspora in Tunisia. We will also devote two weeks to the study of the representation of Turks, Muslims, and Moriscos in Cervantes’ plays and novels, including several chapters of his famous Don Quixote. All texts are in Spanish, including Arab sources by Ibn Hazm, Wallada, Muhya, and other Hispano-Arabic and Morisco writers.  

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above

Hector Melo Ruiz

This course studies the cultural representation of labor in Latin America. It focuses on the racial division of labor over the colonial, industrial, and neoliberal periods. We will analyze a wide range of visual and literary representations of Native, Black and women workers under the Encomienda labor system; peonages during the period of independence and specific national contexts (i.e. rubber tapper); industrial workers throughout the twentieth century (blue-collar workers); as well as the role of unemployment and precarized labor within the context of globalization.

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above