| FYS II: Hollywoodland |
Liberal Arts |
1005 (028) |
Spring 2027 |
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Description
FYS II are theme-based writing courses designed for first-year students, with an emphasis on further developing the foundational writing skills students learned in FYS I. Students will continue to hone the intellectual skills of reading critically, and writing responsively, which forms the basis of each student's career at the School. While faculty have autonomy in determining course theme, the theme is an accessory to the writing; the balance in these classes is weighed toward explicit writing instruction and workshopping of student writing, not content. This course provides guided experience in writing college-level essays of various kinds, which may include critical, analytical and argumentative essays, and must include the research paper. It is a policy of the department that at least one essay be a research paper which may involve searching for sources in a library or online, learning to make citations, and preparing an annotated bibliography. A significant amount of time is devoted to the craft of writing, and more sophisticated methods of argumentation and use of evidence and developing independent claims and ideas are explored. Students should expect to write 20-25 pages of formal, revisable writing across the course of the semester. A significant amount of time may be devoted to re-writing essays, so as to develop first drafts into final versions. In-class writing, short homework exercises, and workshopping of student work may be included. Individual meetings to discuss each student's papers should be expected.
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Class Number
1337
Credits
3
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| Masterworks: Pride and Prejudice |
Liberal Arts |
3110 (001) |
Summer 2026 |
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Description
Jane Austen¿s Pride and Prejudice is enduringly popular, constantly adapted, critically celebrated, and occasionally detested. It is also a keystone in the history of the novel. Austen¿s novel is a landmark attempt to grapple with, and solve, the fundamental problems that underlie novelistic fiction and representation¿from the difficulty of self-reflection and of knowing other minds, to the problem of representing the modern self; from the emergence of character to the co-existence of critique and sentimental attachment to social practices and prejudices, including class, status, and gender. In this intensive, three-week course, we will read and discuss the novel very closely. Questions we will ask together include: How does Pride and Prejudice reflect and respond to the wider world in which Austen lived¿its norms, politics, economics, gender dynamics, class hierarchies, and aesthetic values? How does the marriage plot present the relation between freedom and responsibility? And what can Austen¿s masterpiece teach us about living and writing meaningfully in times of profound inequality and absurdity?
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Class Number
1301
Credits
3
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| Shakespeare |
Liberal Arts |
3122 (001) |
Fall 2026 |
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Description
This course is both a broad introduction to Shakespeare and an opportunity to delve deeply into some of his most enchanting, disturbing, maddening, and comical works. Students should expect a good amount of reading (as well as a good amount of learning how to navigate the challenging aspects of his language and style). We will likely read at least one play from the following major genres (paying the most attention to the last): history, comedy, romance, and tragedy. We will also consider performances and adaptations and spend time on a broad selection of Shakespeare's sonnets. Students will engage in multiple formats of peer discussion, take turns presenting material, and complete regular writing assignments in response to the reading.
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Class Number
1667
Credits
3
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| LH:Ghost Poetics |
Liberal Arts |
3190 (006) |
Spring 2027 |
|
Description
Few cultures anywhere in space and time have not taken haunting seriously. Ghosts fill literary and historical space, provoking fear and desire, revenge fantasies and death wishes. This course will draw from poetic traditions spanning the globe and human history in order to experience (at secondhand, at least) and contextualize occult, spiritualist, gothic, and spectral aesthetics as recurring facts of cultural history. Readings from a wide range of global poetry will be supplemented by related non-literary materials (for example, spirit photography and heretical religious tracts) and some contemporary theory that falls under what has been called the 'spectral turn' in cultural criticism. We will look at the ways ghosts and hauntings construct and form subjectivity, both socially and individually. If the dead always return, and history always repeats, how do different traditions conceive ghostliness? In what way are socio-political specters?racial figures, the murdered or 'disappeared,' witches and other types at the margins?dealt with, radically accepted, sheltered, or eliminated in poetry? Is poetry always a matter of haunting?
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Class Number
2106
Credits
3
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| LH:Marxism, Art, and Culture |
Liberal Arts |
3190 (008) |
Spring 2027 |
|
Description
Marxism isn't just about the 'real world' critique of capitalism and the potential rise of communism. Many thinkers and critics who have written in the wake of Karl Marx have tried to articulate what it means (and why it's important) to read like a Marxist, to understand literature, art, and all the rest of human culture as a historical expression of the human condition under capital. This course serves as an introduction to Marxism and Marxist aesthetics, literary criticism, and cultural critique. We will begin by reading Marx and Engels, and then spend most of the semester considering core concepts as they develop over the subsequent century and a half of Marxist art, literary, and cultural criticism. We will ask questions like: what is the relationship between narrative representation, socio-political life, and its underlying economic forces? Do artworks produce autonomous worlds and meanings or are they entirely shaped by capitalism and class society? How do artifacts like novels, poems, theatrical texts, films, or visual artworks theorize history and society? What do the rise of specific forms, genres, and popular cultural practices tell us about social history? To what extent is it useful to read like/as a Marxist (and are there limitations in doing so)?
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Class Number
2157
Credits
3
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