Spring Words Sections

Morning Sections (MWF 11:30am-12:30pm)

 

Why Write?

Andrea Hibbard, Assoc Prof w/Term of English

• Core 120-01 - MWF 11:30am-12:30pm

George Orwell posed this question in his autobiographical 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His answers — “sheer egoism,” “aesthetic enthusiasm,” “historical impulse,” and “political purpose” — will serve as the starting point for this class. Orwell’s question has acquired new relevance because we now have large language models that can do our writing for us and do it quickly. The question has also taken on a renewed urgency because we have entered one of those “tumultuous, revolutionary ages” that Orwell says threatens to pit aesthetic pleasure against the political and mercenary. In this class, we will read and discuss essays, poems, short stories, memoirs, autotheory and other works of creative nonfiction that explicitly or implicitly wrestle with the question “Why write?” Authors may include Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Jill Lepore, Ada Limón, Carmen Maria Machado, and Patrick Radden Keefe.

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Knowledge, Power, Responsibility

Catherine Sprecher Loverti, Visiting Prof of World Languages & Literature - German

• Core 120-02- MWF 11:30am-12:30pm

In public discourse, you often hear the expression ‘Knowledge is Power.’ Yet what does this really mean? What is knowledge, and what is its relation to power? And what are the ethical implications of this power for individuals, groups, and society at large? In this course, we will look at different forms of knowledge and how writers, film-makers, and other artists envision power, as well as the responsibility that comes with it. In some works, knowledge as power can lead to the liberation of individuals and whole groups, especially if that knowledge is forbidden (examples include Plato, Frederick Douglass, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, The Matrix, Black Panther). In other works, knowledge leads to a different form of power, namely a power that reaches beyond its creators and threatens to destroy them (examples include Frankenstein, The Sandman, Dr. Strangelove, Blade Runner, Oppenheimer). Throughout the semester, we will explore how knowledge leads to power, and how the individual is faced with the responsibility resulting from this power. We will investigate these ideas by studying works ranging from the Bible to Barbie.

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MWF 1:50-2:50pm Sections

 

Taking Flight: Germany and Migration

Katja Altpeter-Jones, Assoc Prof of German

• Core 120-14 - MWF 1:50-2:50pm

In this course, we will study films, short stories, and novels as well as autobiographical, historical and theoretical writings that examine the topic of migration, of choosing or being forced to leave home.

While we will focus on materials from the German speaking world (all in English translation), our readings, discussions and explorations allow us to examine the topic of migration in a way that is broadly and globally applicable. This topic also lends itself to personal exploration as most of us have some personal experience with what it feels like to take flight, to be in transit, to leave home, or to lose a feeling of belonging.

Please Note: Students taking this course should be prepared to grapple with material that can be disturbing.

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The Greatest American Novels: 2014-2023

Rachel Cole, Assoc Prof of English

• Core 120-09- MWF 1:50-2:50pm

Each November, five distinguished judges choose one novel or story collection as the winner of that year’s National Book Award for Fiction. Each panel of judges is free to set its own criteria for the award, and as such the list of winners through the years represents an evolving sense of what can and should count as the very best of American literature. In this course, we will read and study some of the novels that have won the National Book Award over the last ten years. (As well as one that was awarded the Booker Prize.) As we read, we will try to answer three questions: What stories and characters, what questions and concerns, occupy the “best” American literature today? How consistent are these novels in their interests and preoccupations—do they converge in their understandings of what it means to be American in the second-third decades of the twenty-first century? Finally, to what extent do each of us recognize their questions and concerns as our own? Do these, publicly celebrated novels represent our own Americas—our cultures, our present moments, our worries and joys?

Texts: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016); George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017); Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (2018); Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (2020); and Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch (2023).

Note: Several of these texts engage difficult topics, including racial violence, sexual violence, and suicide. They have graphic descriptions of violent acts or experiences and disturbing accounts of the physical and emotional aftermath. If you find reading about and discussing such topics traumatic, this might not be the section for you. If you have any questions or would like to talk before selecting this section, please let me know—I would be happy to chat over email or on Zoom.

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The Power of Song: Music and Social Critique

John K. Cox, Visiting Prof of Music

• Core 120-08 - MWF 1:50-2:50pm

This course examines music as a medium for social critique, focusing on the combination of sound and lyrics to confront issues of injustice, identity, and resistance. Using examples from folk, popular, jazz, rock, punk, and hip-hop students will explore how these genres have reflected and shaped political and cultural movements and given voice to their respective communities. Topics include protest and resistance, censorship, race, class, gender, and the role of music in social change. Students will be expected to critically analyze, discuss, and write about the meaning and context of song lyrics. As a final project, students will also be asked to compose song lyrics in response to a current or past social issue.

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This American Language

Keith Dede, Prof of Chinese

• Core 120-07 - MWF 1:50-2:50pm

From the texts, emails, and essays we read and write to the lunch chats, lectures and dorm-room deep-dives we participate in, we spend our days swimming in language. What patterns can be discerned in this ocean of communication, and what do those patterns say about our country, our community and ourselves? In this class we will turn a scientific eye to language itself, asking such questions as, “What influences our language choices?”, “What judgments do we make about language use?”, and, “Why do my parents put … in their texts?!”. We will discuss such issues as linguistic diversity, linguistic discrimination, language endangerment and language revitalization. Through essays (such as Rosina Lippi-Green’s “Language Ideology and Language Prejudice”), films (such as, “The Linguists”), novels (“James”), and podcasts (“Vocal Fry”), we will explore the rich diversity of language in North America with the aim of understanding some of the many issues with which it is entangled.

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“Who Tells Your Story” : Words, Power, and Knowledge

Isabelle DeMarte, Assoc Prof of French

• Core 120-05 – MWF 1:50-2:50pm

In the opening song of Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, An American Musical, the story of forgotten founding father Alexander Hamilton emerges from a multitude of voices. The last song “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”, leaves the audience wondering about the power of storytelling at the crossroads where individual stories meet collective history, and common understanding meets scientific knowledge. Positioning ourselves at that crossroads, we will approach course material through the lens of the core questions: Who tells the story, what story do they tell, what is (are) their audience(s), what conversation(s) are they entering, when, and how are they doing so? Asked in the heart of an institution of higher education, where knowledge is passed down and examined critically, these questions will help us examine how various artistic, historical, literary and scientific narratives contribute to shaping our lives. Reflecting the course emphasis on telling stories that complicate mainstream narratives, class participants will explore podcasting as an alternative storytelling medium to long form essay writing. They will apply the core questions asked about stories throughout the semester to a story they want to tell, and create a podcast around it.

Materials include Hamilton (2015), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the [En]slave[d] is the Fourth of July” (1852). Additionally, Olympe de Gouges’s controversial drama on slavery and rewriting of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man shift our “American” lens towards that of the French Enlightenment, with its reshaping of knowledge and its emphasis on empowering the individual against the institution. The course ends with a speaker series introducing us to ways of knowing that provide alternative stories to traditional, mainstream narratives about the natural world.

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People, Paleography, and the Past: Analyzing the Slavery Archive

Nancy Gallman, Asst Prof of History

• Core 120-12 – MWF 1:50-2:50pm

The sources we use to study the history of slavery in North America exist in multiple forms and archives. Written and unwritten narratives, diaries, newspapers, legal codes, trial transcripts, ledgers, material culture, visual art, music–all found in archives, libraries, museums, family papers, and memories. How do we discover and recover these materials? How do we analyze them to understand their origins, their purpose, and their significance? How do we interpret them to answer questions about the institution of slavery, the experience of slavery, and the end of slavery? Do the voices of the enslaved speak in these records? How do we use the slavery archive to work through the silences and fathom the realities of their lives? What are the stakes of this kind of research?

In this course, we will address these questions by exploring major themes in the history of slavery and annotating the world’s largest document collection on this topic, Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. This database contains over five million pages of archival material from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries written in multiple languages, including Spanish, English, and French. With a combination of collaborative research, discussion, and writing, students will develop skills in paleography (deciphering handwritten historical manuscripts) and historical analysis to examine the archive’s role in the study of enslaved peoples and the people who enslaved them.

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Exile and Belonging

Mo, Healy, Assoc Prof of History

• Core 120-04 – MWF 1:50-2:50pm

For this course we will study works that dramatize and theorize the condition of exile: enforced residence in a foreign land. In some texts the journey into exile is a metaphor; in others it is an escape, a physical ordeal, or a psychological odyssey. The experience of exile in turn raises questions about what it means to truly “belong” somewhere. Along the way, will encounter authors who articulate the challenge of belonging and the drama of exile. We will pair classic texts of banishment and repatriation such as the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, with contemporary texts and films from our modern world of borders, passports, and defined nationalities. Each author presents a different take on our theme of exile and belonging: Plato prefers death to exile from his beloved Athens, and Frederick Douglass asks what it takes for a slave to become free. We will read of Aeneas’s ancient exile and reestablishing a home, accounts of mass incarceration in the United States, displacement in Palestine and the afterlife of parents’ immigration in the imaginations of their children. Each of us brings to this class a personal sense of what it means to belong (or not); this can serve as a starting point for our exploration of others’ historical and modern experiences of exile.

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Conceptions of Justice: God, the State, and Outcasts

Todd Locher, Dr. Robert B Pamplin, Jr Prof of Government

• Core 120-03 - MWF 1:50-2:50pm

This course examines the concept of justice and its relationship to human affairs. Questions to be addressed include: Does justice flow from divine will? The state? Reason? Does it even exist? What is the relationship between society and justice? How do we balance the desire for justice with other values such as love or compassion—or are the latter an intrinsic element of the former? Is justice as a concept fixed, or does it change depending on time and culture? What do we owe people whose actions deeply offend our sense of justice, if anything? In order to explore these questions, we will examine a variety of challenging and sometimes controversial readings from the fields of literature, philosophy, and religion.

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Suspense / Horror / Paranoia

Michael Mirabile, Asst Prof w/Term of English

• Core 120-10 – MWF 1:50-2:50pm

This course will be devoted to examining varieties of fear from a number of distinct but related perspectives: cultural, psychological, historical, and social. Special attention is given to how these fears correspond to genre categories in literature and film: namely, the thriller, the Gothic or horror story, and the conspiratorial narrative (often cited as an example of a general “paranoid style”). Does the mechanism of suspense change over time? Do objects of horror also change? Why do collective expressions of suspicion and paranoia undergo periodic renewals, such as during the Cold War era in the United States? Our goal in this course will be to look closely at shifts in perspective and at the contexts within which are found powerful inducements to anxiety. Our primary materials for analysis and discussion will be twentieth-century films and works of literature. Authors may include Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Richard Matheson. Film directors may include David Cronenberg, Jordan Peele, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott.

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Identity and Belonging

Brittney Peake, Inst in Academic English Studies

• Core 120-06 - MWF 1:50-2:50pm

In this course, we will explore the complexity of identity and how authenticity and intentionality help cultivate belonging. We will adopt a systems approach, focusing on the interconnections between identity and social position, as well as navigating belonging in relation to place and practices of true belonging.

We will immerse ourselves in various works of literature- including a memoir, short stories, and poetry- that connect to the course themes, along with essays and books focused on personal development and community empowerment. Longer works will include Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina, and Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. We will also engage with shorter pieces by Beverly Daniel Tatum, David Sedaris, Kai Chang Thom, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Throughout the course, you will be encouraged to reflect on your own identities and your processes for cultivating belonging both within yourself and in your relationships with others.

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David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead

Will Pritchard, Assoc Prof of English

• Core 120-11 – MWF 1:50-2:50pm

This section of Words centers on two rich and fascinating novels: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (published serially 1849-50) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022).

Dickens is perhaps England’s greatest novelist, and in David Copperfield, which Dickens described as his “favourite child,” we find all the things we have learned to call “Dickensian”: plucky orphans, sadistic schoolmasters, a bustling, polluted London, a large cast of eccentric and comical side characters, memorable villains, tragic deaths, gripping storytelling and (behind it all) an amazingly fertile and compassionate authorial imagination. Demon Copperhead, as its name suggests, both resembles and differs from David Copperfield. Kingsolver reimagines Dickens’s novel for the 21 st century, relocating it to rural Appalachia in the midst of the opioid epidemic. She preserves much of Copperfield’s structure while adapting its language and situations to our troubled times. The novel was highly acclaimed (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023), and it is best read in tandem with the book on which it is based.

We will devote the first two months of the course to reading, discussing and writing about David Copperfield. After spring break, we will read and discuss Demon Copperhead, and students will write a longer paper that considers one book in light of the other.

Please note: these are long novels. We will be reading them slowly, but you will still have 50-60 pages to read for each class, and there will be regular short writing assignments as well. This course will require your steady and sustained engagement throughout the semester.

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Hope

Jessie Starling, Prof of Religious Studies

• Core 120-13 – MWF 1:50-2:50pm

We have all heard of the Greek myth about Pandora, who opened the container sent from Zeus only to let all manner of evils escape to plague humanity. And yet, she managed to close the lid before one last thing escaped: hope.

The question of whether and how to hope would seem to have a unique relevance today. In this class, we will explore the theme of hope from diverse perspectives and in diverse historical contexts. We will first read about the “problem of hope” in the Western intellectual tradition (Greek myths, Hebrew prophets, and thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Ernst Bloch, and Richard Rorty). Then we will examine multiple perspectives on hope as it relates to the struggle for racial justice in the U.S. (Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and Ta-Nehisi Coates). Finally, we will explore arguments for hope in the face of climate change. Together we will reflect on what may, and what may not, happen next, and what reasons there are to be hopeful.