First-Year Seminar Program
Director: Adrian W. B. Randolph
Administrator: Priscilla Rondinone
First-Year Seminars offer every Dartmouth first-year student an opportunity to participate in a course structured around independent research, small group discussion, and intensive writing. For more information on the goals and guidelines for First-Year Seminars, please visit the First-Year Seminar website at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~fyseminr/. There, you will also find information about the resources available to both instructors and students, and about the annual Dickerson Essay Prize.
Below you will find a list of the courses being offered next term arranged by class hour. Following that, you will find descriptions of the seminars arranged by the name of the department or program offering the course.
9
• Imagination Unbound: Fantastic and Uncanny Tales, Prof. Ulrike Rainer (Comparative Literature 7.1)
10
• The Economy vs. the Environment, Prof. Karen Fisher-Vanden (Environmental Studies 7.2)
• Gender and Nation in Contemporary Spanish Film, Prof. Annabel Martín (Women’s and Gender Studies 7.1)
10A
• Legal and Ethical Perspectives, Prof. Fillia Makedon (Computer Sciences 7.1)
• The Solar System, Prof. Susan Taylor (Earth Sciences 7.1)
• College Learning and Student Development, Prof. Carl Thum (Education 7.1)
• Constructions of Race and Sexuality in the New Negro Movement, Prof. William Cook (English 7.1)
• Challenging the Color Line: Changing Constructions of "Race" in American, Prof. Josna Rege (English 7.4)
• Buddhism in American Literature, Prof. Woon Ping Chin (English 7.7)
• Population, Consumption, and Sustainability, Prof. James Hornig (Environmental Sciences 7.1)
• Representations of the Creative Artist in Film, Prof. David Ehrlich (Film and Television Studies 7.1)
• International Cinema and World War II, Prof. Jeffrey Ruoff (Film and Television Studies 7.2)
• Jews and Hollywood: The Making of American Dreams, Prof. Michael Bronski (Jewish Studies 7.1)
• Women, Gender, and Science, Prof. Laura Conkey (Geography 7.1)
• Guns! The Politics and Law of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Prof. Richard Winters (Government 7.2)
• Searching for Life in the Universe, Prof. Brian Chaboyer (Physics 7.1)
• Credulity: Science, Pseudoscience, and Thinking Critically About Human Behavior, Prof. John F. Pfister (Psychological and Brain Sciences 7.1)
• Art and Social Justice, Prof. Sydne Mahone (Theater 7.1)
11
• Immigrant Women in America, Prof. Melissa Zeiger (English 7.6)
• Men, Women, and War: Gender in Wartime in the Twentieth-Century West, Prof. Margaret Darrow (History 7.1)
12
• Machiavelli, Prof. Roger Masters (Government 7.1)
2
• Sabotaging Novel and Poetry: "Terrorists" in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature, Prof. Giuseppe Cavatorta (Italian 7.1)
• The Vietnam War, Prof. Ronald Edsforth (History 7.2)
2A
• Jerusalem: Vision and Reality, Prof. Lewis Glinert (Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures 7.1)
• Envisioning Latin America, Prof. Rebecca Heinowitz (English 7.2)
• Upheaval at Mid-Century: The Personalizaton, Prof. Cleopatra Mathis (English 7.3)
• Strongman/Weakman/Wildman/Dangerman/Madman/Loverman: The Epic Hero and the Literary Conventions of a Warrior Ethos, Prof. Thomas Sleigh (English 7.5)
7.1. Jerusalem: Vision and Reality
Lewis Glinert
Hour: 2A
Jerusalem, as a vision and as a reality, has always mesmerized Jewish minds—Royal City of Solomon, Holy of Holies, kabbalistic core of the world, site of a foretold apocalypse, twice razed to the ground, focus of Diaspora dreams, since 1948 once more a Jewish capital, but divided for two decades by war and still savagely fought over. In this course, we will sample the symbolism of Jerusalem across 3000 years of Jewish intellectual and artistic expression, from the Bible down to contemporary Israeli and Diaspora arts, in poetry and prose, in film, music and the visual arts. Through the Biblical prophets, medieval folklore, Israeli cinema, Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize winning novels, Yiddish lullabies and many other forms of expression, we will ask: Can one find in "Jerusalem" a consistent set of symbols and values holding firm down the centuries, uniting contemporary Jews with their distant ancestors? And why has this city evoked such passions? Dist: LIT; WCult: NW.
7.1. Imagination Unbound: Fantastic and Uncanny Tales
Ulrike Rainer
Hour: 9
Inexplicable and supernatural events have always fueled the imagination. Fascination with the fantastic and the uncanny has let to a rich and enduring literary tradition replete with fairy tales, horror stories, mysteries, and tales of psychological terror. The seminar will explore the origins and changes of this tradition, examine the meaning of terms such as "fantastic," "uncanny," "mysterious," and "marvelous," and scrutinize literary periods and authors that were especially drawn to the probing of the darker side of human consciousness. We will study the relationship between the portrayal of empirically observable reality in fiction and the description of phenomena and situations that lie outside the reader’s realm of experience. To discover the similarities, differences, and cross-cultural influences of the genre, we shall draw on French, German, Russian, English, and American narratives. Readings will include fairy tales by Perrault, the Grimm brothers, and Andersen as well as works by Balzac, Nerval, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kafka, Gogol, Mary Shelley, Angela Carter, Ambrose Bierce, and Henry James. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU.
7.1. Legal and Ethical Perspectives
Fillia Makedon
Hour: 10A
We live in a fast, computer-driven society, when information is both an asset and a weapon. Geographical boundaries are replaced by global webs of collaborators and personal information of seemingly no importance, is now mined and sold as a commodity, without the individual’s consent. Wars are now wars of technology. National security is now a threat to personal data security. Life-saving solutions, can predict a disease early. Computer science is at the center of this revolution, as it continues to develop new tools to accelerate these processes. At the same time, laws have not changed fast enough to address the new challenges.
This course will (a) give a better understanding of what the field is about, with examples of new developments and (b) enable critical thinking on topics such as, intellectual property for digital media, cryptography, cloning, government and privacy, freedom of speech in cyberspace, electronic commerce, computer crime, computers at work, and others. Students will write papers and make short presentations. Dist: TAS.
7.1. The Solar System
Susan Taylor
Hour: 10A
The solar system consists of our Sun, nine planets (or eight if Pluto is reclassified), many moons and an unknown number of smaller bodies (asteroids, comets, meteorites, cosmic dust). One of the planets, the Earth, has life. What do we know about these bodies? How do we know what we know? What did people know about these objects 100, 500 and 1000 years ago and what might they know in 50 or 100 years?
Some of the scientific discoveries regarding our solar system have profoundly altered our world-view. The Earth is round, not flat. The Sun does not revolve around the Earth; rather, the Earth is one of several planets circling the Sun. The Sun is one star among billions in our galaxy, which in turn is only one galaxy in a space filled with galaxies.
We will read science, science fiction and history of science books and articles to gain a multifaceted view of our place in the universe and how our perceptions of this place continues to change over time. Dist: SCI.
7.1. College Learning and Student Development
Carl Thum
Hour: 10A
Does college make a difference? What is its real impact on undergraduates? Can we substantiate the widely and firmly held beliefs, to cite just a few, that American colleges and universities transmit and intellectual heritage, promote quantitative and communication skills, influence socioeconomic attainment, and develop personal growth and self-identity? Reading will include selections from works by Astin, Perry, Chickering, and Boyer. The primary texts for the course are When Hope and Fear Collide (Levine and Cureton) and Making the Most of College (Light). Dist: SOC.
7.1. Constructions of Race and Sexuality in the New Negro Movement William Cook
Hour: 10A
This seminar will examine the poetry and some of the prose of Langston Hughes and of Countee Cullen in order to clarify the way in which they represent two divergent views of both the art of poetry, its relationship to folk culture and the function of poetry in the construction of racial identity. Special attention will be given to the aesthetics of the New Negro Movement, the Great Migration and to questions of gender and sexuality. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA.
7.2. Envisioning Latin America
Rebecca C. Heinowitz
Hour: 2A
Ever since its "discovery" in 1492, America has been (re)produced for European audiences as literature, art, history, and even science. The Spanish conquistadors created dazzling prospects of America that at once stoked the imagination and whetted colonialist ambitions. With the crumbling of the Iberian empires, the republics of Latin America were thrown open to British and North American entrepreneurs, scientists, and adventurers who struggled to define Anglo-imperialism as somehow different from its Iberian antecedents. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Latin America attracts such diverse chroniclers as Beat poets, ecotourists, radical Marxists, and capitalists lured by cheap labor. In this course we will examine the various reasons why Latin America has been and remains such a powerful object of artistic and political attention. Among the authors whose work we will read are Columbus, Bernal DÌaz, William Robertson, William Prescott, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, William Burroughs, and Alejo Carpentier. Film screening will include The Last Movie, Aguirre: Wrath of God, and Burden of Dreams. Dist: LIT.
7.3. Upheaval at Mid-Century: The Personalization of American Poetry in the Fifties
Cleopatra Mathis
Hour: 2A
The Fifties were a time of great upheaval in American poetry—the vehement turn against the dictates of the New Critics, who dominated the academy and held as a standard the work of T.S. Eliot. Veering away from their modernist predecessors, these young poets moved firmly into the presence and vitality of the personal. Rather than creating an artistic distance between themselves and their subjects, these writers explored the inner reaches of the self below rational and conscious levels, as well as the self’s discovery of the outer world and response to it. Questioning and often destroying both the personal and historical past, these poets created a complex of new ways to view our common condition, turning away from formalism, literary allusion, and the objectification of emotion. Dist: LIT.
7.4. Challenging the Color Line: Changing Constructions of “Race?? in America
Josna Rege
Hour: 10A
Beginning with the changing definitions and representations of that most unscientific concept, "race," we will discuss a range of essays and literary texts, primarily by African American and Asian American writers, investigating what it means to be a member of a racial or ethnic "minority" in the United States. We will also explore the changing constructions of a dominant "whiteness." Readings, writing, and research will combine historical and cultural materials, literary and critical texts. Topics may include: assimilation and double consciousness; racial stereotyping; the "model minority" myth; relationships among different racial and ethnic groups; multiracial and nonracial identities; new identifications in the twenty-first century. Texts may include: W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore; John Okada, No-No Boy; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; California Newsreel, Race: The Power of an Illusion; Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins eds., Race, Class, and Gender: an Anthology; and essays by writers such as Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, Elaine Kim, Toni Morrison, Vijay Prashad, R. Radhakrishnan, and Cornel West. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA.
7.5. Strongman/Weakman/Wildman/Dangerman/Madman/Loverman: The Epic Hero and the Literary Conventions of a Warrior Ethos
Thomas Sleigh
Hour: 2A
In this course, we will look at how epic heroes are defined by the literary conventions that are underwritten by a warrior ethos. At the same time, we’ll be putting critical pressure on that ethos to see the cracks, the flaws, the contradictions, the hints of the absurd that the conventions allow. Robert Lowell’s description of a Ulysses-like alter ego sums up the paradoxical nature of this hero: "…flesh-proud, sore-eyed, scar-proud,/ a vocational killer/in the machismo of senility,/ foretasting the apogee of mayhem—breaking water to destroy his wake." We’ll read the Iliad, Christopher Logue’s adoptions of the Iliad, and Anne Carson’s poem about Hektor in her Men of TV series, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf; Milton’s Samson Agonistes and the story of Samson in the King James Bible, Euripides’ play Heracles; David Ferry’s version of The Gilgamesh; and other similar texts, to discover some of the ways that these texts both resist and ratify the surface glorification of martial prowess, physical strength, and war-like valor. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU.
7.6. Immigrant Women in America
Melissa Zeiger
Hour: 11
We will examine plays, poems, fiction, cinema, and visual arts by foreign-born women living in the United States; we will consider what particular pressures, losses, opportunities, politics, and esthetics their lives and art comprise. Writing assignments will be based on these texts and on analytical essays about them, and will form the center of the course. Dist: LIT.
7.7. Buddhism in American Literature
Woon-Ping Chin
Hour: 10A
This course studies the impact of Buddhist thought on American literature, with a focus on writing by the Beats. Its emphasis is on the contribution of Buddhist thought to aesthetic practice and metaphysical expression in the American literary tradition. A central question addressed in the course is the possibility, in a First World reading of the Third World religious texts and in the process of cross-fertilization between "East" and "West," of moving beyond the impasses of Orientation. Readings may include works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Rullell Leong, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Henry David Thereau, and Anne Waldmann. Dist: LIT.
7.1. Population, Consumption, and Sustainability
James F. Hornig
Hour: 10A
In a famous 1798 essay Thomas Malthus predicted that population increase would inevitably outpace food supply, leading to perpetual human misery and famine. The warning was repeated by Paul Ehrlich in 1968 in a famous book, The Population Bomb, which predicted devastating famine before the end of the twentieth century. In a currently popular book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg claims that the world has never been better fed and that the global population will stabilize within our lifetime. All this while the United Nations reports that 100,000 children in Ethiopia will die of starvation in 2003. What is going on? To complicate the issue, many environmentalists argue that the problem is not population growth, but runaway consumption in the developed countries. This seminar will try to make some sense of these conflicting perceptions, while exploring possible meanings of the concept of "Sustainable Development." Dist: SOC.
7.2. The Economy vs. the Environment
Karen Fisher-Vanden
Hour: 10
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the environment has become an increasingly important issue both domestically and internationally. Questions of how much environmental protection is desirable and how it should be achieved have been the subject of considerable debate. The contention stems from the fact that the economy and the environment are inextricably linked—i.e., raw materials are depleted from the environment to produce economic goods and are ultimately returned to the environment as waste products.
The seminar attempts to grabble with the difficult economic, political, and moral issues surrounding environmental protection. In addition to readings on subjects such as cost-benefits analysis, property rights, environmental regulation and competitiveness, economic instruments for pollution control, international environmental policymaking, and equity, students participate in a number of negotiation exercise in an attempt to understand the difficulties faced by policymakers who must decide on the appropriate level of environmental protection. Dist: SOC.
7.1. Representations of the Creative Artist in Film
David Ehrlich
Hour: 10A
Beginning with the filmic biographies of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mozart, Chopin, Sand and Nijinsky, students will research the letters and journals of these artists as well as contemporary theories of creativity. In class discussions leading to four short papers, students will analyze the ways in which the films express, romanticize or clarify the creators’ struggles to integrate their work processes with love, sex and family life, face the compromises necessary to economic survival, deal with criticism, with physical and emotional stress and work blocks. Concurrent with these studies, students will keep journals of their own creative problems in their chosen art form, with a view towards integrating into their artistic development, the insights gained through their research. Students will also plan and organize the annual Creativity Panels, open to the college community. Readings will include Rembrandt, Master of the Portrait by Pascal Bonafoux, Chopin by James Samson, Story of My Life by Vaclaw Nijinsky, A Short Guide to Writing About Film by Timothy Corrigan, and Coursebook which includes: Book of Creativity by David Ehrlich, Mozart by Marcia Davenport. Dist: ART; WCult: EU.
7.2. International Cinema and World War II
Jeffrey Ruoff
Hour: 10A
The cinema plays a pivotal role in creating and defining our understanding of the past. Through viewings and close analysis of classic international films, this course will explore historical representations of the Second World War. We will consider how the war has been remembered, interpreted, and represented in the cinemas of different European, Asian, and North American countries. In addition to examining expressions of competing political ideologies and the ways in which the conflict transformed national film industries, the course will focus on postwar representations of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings. Films shown will be mostly works of fiction by internationally recognized directors, such as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, but will also include documentaries and animated films. Dist: ART.
7.1. Sabotaging Novel and Poetry: "Terrorists" in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature
Giuseppe Cavatorta
Hour: 2
This course will address major issues in Italian twentieth-century literature with a particular emphasis on the avant-garde and neo avant-garde movements, as well as irregular novelists and poets who tried to overcome the boundaries that the genres tended to impose upon their writings. Readings will include works by Bontempelli, Lucini, D’Annunzio, Delfini, Savinio, Marinetti, Vittorini, Ortese, Niccolai, Pagliarani, Rosselli, Spatola and Balestrini. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU.
7.1. Women, Gender, and Science
Laura Conkey
Hour: 10A
Whether we are openly taught the "scientific method" or not, we all have ideas of how science is supposed to be practiced. What we don’t often know is that there are critiques of that path to knowledge, and increasing emphasis on appreciating "other ways of knowing," including a feminist perspective. In this seminar we will explore what science practice is, and how it is represented in the literature as well as by non-textual sources such as museums, web sites, and other media. We will draw readings from earlier critiques of science such as Thomas Kuhn, and from feminists such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Londa Schiebinger, and Sandra Harding, who write about both theoretical and practical aspects of the intersection of feminism and science. Our work will include field observation and writing, visits with feminists and scientists, and at least one field trip to a science museum. Dist: SCI.
7.1. Machiavelli
Roger D. Masters
Hour: 12
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) is unusual because, like Plato, he is one of the rare thinkers whose name has become a popular descriptive term. To understand why we speak of a "Machiavellian" person or strategy, however, it is first necessary to read Machiavelli’s writings with unusual care. We will focus on three works: Mandragola, a comic play Machiavelli completed in 1517 (and a hit ever since); The Prince, his most famous work; and The Discourses on Titus Livy, a long and difficult book that qualifies in many ways the superficial judgment of Machiavelli’s intentions. In analyzing these texts, we will assess the many conflicting interpretations of Machiavelli’s thought and role in Western history. Was he an apostle of unscrupulous policies and success at any price? A theorist who sought to return to the republican civic virtue of ancient Rome? The founder of the modern nation-state? Class discussions and papers will emphasize close reading of texts, with a focus on explaining specific passages. For historical background, students are encouraged but not required to read Fortune is a River: Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci’s Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History (Free Press, 1998). Dist: PHR.
7.2. Guns! The Politics and Law of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Richard Winters
Hour: 10A
There is probably no other issue in America that has generated quite so much popular political passion and journalistic ink, yet has so little accompanying academic analysis as "guns and the 2nd Amendment." What does the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establish? A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. There is a "collective view," well-articulated by political groups such as the Brady Campaign and Handgun Control, Inc., that the Amendment establishes only a collective right, such as in a "state militia," not an individual right to keep and bear arms. There is the rival claim, let’s label it the "individual view," most vigorously represented by the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America, that the scholars in the above disciplines, as well as economists and historians that argues for a re-Amendment establishes just such an individual right to gun ownership. The collective view has long been, in fact, the "conventional view" of sociologists, political scientists, and most law faculty. A "revisionist view" has grown in recent years that is fueled by a number of examination of the constitutional basis for the individual right. We will examine the origin and history of the Amendment, the legal consequences of its adoption as played out in U.S. Federal Courts, current legal challenges to law and policy, the arguments for and against the individual vs. collective view of the Amendment, and the debate between conventional and revisionist scholars. We will examine some of the analyses of the consequences of the widespread distribution of arms in America. We can rely on many local sources of information—Vermont, for example, has the most "individualistic" gun public policies of any state in the Union, followed closely by New Hampshire and Maine. Dist: SOC; WCult: NA.
7.1. Men, Women, and War: Gender in Wartime in the Twentieth-Century West
Margaret Darrow
Hour: 11
War, as understood in Western culture, has been associated exclusively with men. Yet, in the twentieth century, war has involved whole societies, women as well as men, and the rhetoric of warfare has called upon and prescribed both feminine and masculine virtues and activities. By reading theorists such as Nancy Huston, memories such as Studs Terkel, The Good War and novels such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as well as historians, and viewing films, students will examine how Europeans and Americans of both genders experiences the major wars of twentieth century. What impacts did these wars have upon the experiences of men and women and their ideas of masculinity and femininity? And, conversely, what impact did ideas and practices of gender difference have upon war? Dist: SOC; WCult: EU.
7.2. The Vietnam War
Ronald W. Edsforth
Hour: 2
This seminar will provide students the opportunity to develop in-depth understanding of the Vietnam War 1945–1975. Students will study the struggle to establish a unified and independent Vietnam from various Vietnamese and American perspectives. Reading and interpretation of primary sources including official documents, diaries, memories, and oral histories will be stressed. Students will also interpret fiction, poetry, music, and films. Dist: PHR; WCult: NW.
7.1. Jews and Hollywood: The Making of American Dreams
Michael Bronski
Hour: 10A
This seminar will look not only at the tremendous input Jewish writers, performers, artists, and producers have had upon Hollywood, but will discuss how the U.S. film industry influenced how all Americans viewed national identity, success, and citizenship. The course will use readings in history, film criticism, sociology, and theory as well as primary source materials and students will be expected to watch and discuss up to twenty films. Dist: ART; WCult: NA.
7.1. Searching for Life in the Universe
Brian Chaboyer
Hour: 10A
Are we alone in the universe? This profound question has been asked for over two thousand years. Science is now attempting to answer this question. There are three distinct efforts underway searching for signs of extraterrestrial life: (1) an ambitious plan to explore our solar system, and in particular Mars for signs of life (past or present); (2) the development of new space telescopes which will look for earth-type planets orbiting other stars which harbor life, and (3) a search using radio telescopes to listen for signals originating from extraterrestrial sources. This course will examine the conditions which are believed to be necessary for the development of life, the probability that extraterrestrial life exists, and will present an overview of our efforts to determine if we are alone in the universe. Readings will include Captured by Aliens by J. Achenbach, Rare Earth by P. Ward and D. Brownlee, and Here be Dragons by D. Koerner and S. Levay. Dist: SCI.
7.1. Credulity: Science, Pseudoscience, and Thinking Critically About Human Behavior
John F. Pfister
Hour: 10A
Despite little, no, or even contrary evidence, a large number of pseudoscientific and otherwise dubious psychological practices and areas of study have caught the public’s attention during the last two decades (Lilienfeld, Lohr, and Morier, 2001). Claims of such things as recovered memories, facilitated communication, extrasensory perception, alien abduction, communication with the deceased, homeopathic remedies, and New Age psychotherapies have gained increasing popularity in the mass media and among the general public. Why do such beliefs persist, and how do we evaluate new claims in science? This course will give students the tools to make their own decisions regarding what would constitute sufficient evidence for belief. Statistical and methodological arguments will be emphasized. Readings will include selections from Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe in Weird Things, Robert Park’s Voodoo Science, David Myers, Intuition, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, Keith Stanovich’s How To Think Straight about Psychology, and, Flim-Flam, by James Randi. In addition, students will draw from original journal articles and the popular press to build their own library for skeptical analysis. Dist: SOC.
7.1. Art and Social Justice
Sydne Mahone
Hour: 10A
Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, legendary actors of stage, television and film, chronicle their journey together as artists and activists in a joint memoir, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. This course will utilize the memoir as roadmap for a parallel study of the history and politics of Black Theatre from the 1940’s to the 1990's along with selected plays that shaped their careers. Texts include On Strivers Row (Hill), The World of Sholom Aleichem (Perl, trans.), Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, I’m Not Rappaport (Gardner), Wedding Band (Childress), and Purlie Victorious (Davis). Selected essays along with original plays will complement this study of the use of art for the advancement of social justice. Students will write bi-weekly critiques of each play’s reflection of political and historical events (e.g. McCarthyism, Civil Rights Movement and globalism). Dist: ART.
7.1. Gender and Nation in Contemporary Spanish Film
Annabel Martín
Hour: 10
Contemporary Spanish cinema is an exceptional venue for the study of the politics of nationalism and its effects on the representation of gender. This course will offer cultural and political "readings" of a select body of Spanish films in order to study how gender constructs (specific socio-cultural performances of the body) are historically determined and become part of actual film narrative. Topics include the Francoist remapping of womanhood and archaic models of masculinity, the resistance to the dictatorship and the body, gender crossing, homosexuality, national violence and gender, postmodernism and virtual bodies, and spaces for solidarity. Filmmakers include Bigas Luna, Mur Oti, Pedro Almodóvar, Arantxa Lazcano, Chus Gutiérrez, Helena Taberna, Marta Balletbó-Coll, Pilar Miró, Julio Medem, Imanol Uribe, and Alejandro Amenábar. Dist: ART; WCult: EU.
Source: First Year Office, 12/22/03
