In this course we will look at four British women novelists of the 19th century -- Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who are united by their differences as well as by their commonalities. All four novelists examined critically the condition of women in their times and the possibilities of love and happiness that were open to them. Yet while Gaskell took much from Charlotte Bronte, and the two Bronte sisters were very close, both Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte were harsh critics of what they saw as the superficiality and social conformism of Jane Austen. In many ways, North and South and Jane Eyre represent critiques of Pride and Prejudice. The course will focus on these authors' greatest novels -- Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and North and South, and some attention will also be given to recent movie adaptations of these books.

Taught by a working professional actor/director, this introduction to acting will lead the beginning student through the artistic process involved in acting for the stage and other media. Through exercises, study of technique, scene work and improvisation the student will work to develop natural abilities and will become familiar with the working language and tools of the modern actor. Emphasis in this class will be on the physical self, mental preparation, the imagination, and discipline. Written work will include keeping a journal and writing a character analysis. Perfect attendance in this course is vital and mandatory.
Sophomore and above

American literature I focuses on the major writers of American literature from Puritan times through the Civil War. These writers include the puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor; the spokesperson for the enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin; and the deeply influential writers of the period of American romanticism: Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Students will keep journals, write three papers, and take mid-term and final exams. The course includes a field trip to Concord, Massachusetts, the place where the lives of several of the writers of the American Renaissance converged.

The workshop is a gift to the writer, who usually writes alone, without the benefit of a reaction from his or her readers. Once you have tried your hand at one story this semester, your second will be workshopped by your peers. In preparation for your writing, you will read the work of numerous published authors as well as essays on the craft, and will write frequent generative exercises. We will approach published and student work with the same goal in mind: to discover in ourselves what we wish to write and how to go about writing it. In the workshop, we will also support this process in others. At the semester's end, you will submit a portfolio of your work, including select exercises and a revised version of one of your stories.
Sophomore and above

The Beginning Poetry Writing Workshop focuses on the creation and appreciation of works of literature; the education of; students in diverse traditions of poetry writing, performance, publication, and scholarship; and discovery and innovation in the literary arts. Although students at all levels of undergraduate and graduate study can take the course, our commitment is to beginning a practice in poetry and sustaining it for a period of twelve weeks, and perhaps beyond. In this course, students will establish a writing practice, develop and articulate a poetics (your commitments as a poet), write a collection of poetry, perform and publish poems, and curate and produce events and/or publications.
Sophomore and above

Concentrating on classic texts that still appeal to most readers, we will read and discuss major (and some minor) poems, plays and prose works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Johnson, and others, reviewing British literary history from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.

This course will provide students with a foundation in the major movements, debates, and thinkers of twentieth- and twenty-first century critical theory. We will begin from both Marxist and psychoanalytic engagements with semiotics, visuality, mass media, sexuality, and representation. Proceeding through structuralism and post structuralism, we will examine the important contemporary debates about the individual's relationship to identity, aesthetics, power, history, technology, and the lived environment taking place in recent feminism, queer and postcolonial theory, and eroticism. No previous familiarity with critical theory is required. Critics will include Marx, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Benjamin, Lukacs, Adorno, Barthes, Derrida, Althusser, Crary, Baudrillard, Butler, Harraway, Said, Chow, and Zizeck.

This course examines contemporary American fiction and film, which means that the narratives (family narratives, historical narratives, and so on) were written or produced within the past twenty years. Specific titles will change each semester in an effort to study current ideas and styles. Writers of significant stature in American literature, like Philip Roth, will be included as well as notable new writers, like David Guterson, Ann Patchett, and Jhumpa Lahiri. A film will be scheduled and discussed during class each week. While some narratives directly confront contemporary American culture, others may look at the present indirectly, using history, or focus on events in other parts of the world. Attention will be paid to satirical portraits of the American family and to political narratives, whether they address global conflicts or the politics of work, family, friendship, identity, love, and sex. Short interpretive papers will be required in response to the fiction and film. Class attendance and thoughtful participation are mandatory. An evening screening time will be scheduled. Students who miss the screening are responsible for seeing the required film before class discussion.

This course is designed to help students write clearly, correctly, and effectively with an emphasis on basic principles in action. Students will be assigned to Fundamentals of Writing if their entering test scores and/or a placement test indicate a need for intensive writing study. This course does not replace LAS-E101. Students must take LAS-E101 after successfully completing this course.
Permission of Instructor Required. Contact the Division of Liberal Arts.

This course will examine the dual Haitian Revolution as a pivotal moment in the making of the modern world. It will review the various historical interpretations of the Haitian events, examine how these events contribute to or trouble our ideas about modern politics and notions of freedom as well as our conceptions of revolution. The course will engage in these issues working through three archives: Vodou Religion; The Art of the Revolution and the conventional historiography about the revolution.
This course is in collaboration with Brown University.

An introduction to the range and diversity of African American literature, from the 19th-century slave narrative to contemporary magical realism and science fiction. We will focus on the development of particular literary movements (a women's sentimental tradition, the Harlem Renaissance, African American modernism) and their relation to the American canon. Authors may include Douglass, Jacobs, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Morrison.

What is journalism in the 21st century? Students in this workshop will strive to answer this question through reading, discussion, and hands-on reporting. Taking the RISD community as their "beat", students will regularly publish news, profile, feature, opinion, and arts-coverage pieces. They will also discuss various texts - from gawker.com and This American Life to the New Yorker and the New York Times -to understand the journalistic successes and scandals of recent memory. The class will stress journalistic ideals and skills like fact-checking and interviewing, while, at the same time, students will experiment with blogs, videos, podcasts, social networks, and other new-media tools. We will host guest speakers from a variety of media outlets over the course of the semester.
Sophomore and Above
Course not available via web registration. Contact the Division of Liberal Arts to register.

Journalistic writing is an act of seeing out into the world of observable fact. In this course, the student will be introduced to the craft of journalism, including feature articles, interviews, reporting on events, reviews and editorials. Emphasis will be placed on the exploration of our community and the discipline of presenting the results of our quest before the public.
Sophomore and above

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments.
Required for graduation for all undergraduates, including transfers. There are no waivers for ENGL-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.
For the Fall term, freshmen are pre-registered into this course. Upperclassmen may register for the Spring term by contacting the Liberal Arts Office.

This Liberal Arts Elective is a hands-on investigation of the development of Latin handwritten letters from about 200 BCE to about 1500 CE, analyzing scripts and script families from Roman cursive and monumental letters to the Renaissance letters that were the basis of most modern fonts. The emphasis of the course is on dynamic analysis of letters as written rather than static forms, though we will also explore the implications of the Platonic and later organic/evolutionary models that are the traditional means for understanding the history of letterforms. Students will master a basic Italic hand; study and write versions of a dozen or more historical scripts originally executed with styli, brushes, and reed, quill, and metal pens; make pens from river reeds and other materials (and write with them); and investigate the properties of papyrus, wood, vellum, and paper as writing surfaces. The class will visit at least one museum, spend extensive time outside of class practicing letters, and write two papers involving the historical contexts, paleographic characteristics, and calligraphic/graphic procedures for particular handwritten manuscripts. Although all the scripts studied were originally written right-handed, left-handed students have excelled in the course.

A workshop-style course which combines English with a studio project for students with an interest in children's picture books. Students will learn to develop storytelling skills (imagination, language, plot, character, and voice) and illustration techniques (characterization, setting, page, layout) by studying picture books and completing writing and illustration assignments. For their final projects, students will be expected to produce an original text, sketch dummy, and two to four finished pieces of art. The class will also include an overview of publishing procedures and published writers/illustrators will be invited to share their experiences and critique students' work.
Students who register for this course must register for both LAS E416 and ILLUS 5265 for a total of 6 credits. Open to Junior and Senior Illustration majors.

This course explores the intersection of the questions "What is the political?" and "What is the political film?" Filmmakers and scholars have asked these questions in a variety of ways: Can film form be fascist? Or left-leaning radical? Can the form be radical if the content is not? And, vice versa, can content be radical in a traditional form? Is film political only in terms of social issues? Or can film be political also in terms of filmmaking? The arrival of film theory's idea of the political unconscious made it possible to ask these questions even of the slightest Hollywood entertainment. In order to make sense of this discussion we will consider the political use of the apparatus, the narrative, the genre--documentary, Hollywood blockbuster, independent--and the reception as well as the history of the political film. Throughout the course our speculation will be aimed at answering the practical question "How does one make a political film?" Students will be required to write analytical papers throughout the semester.
Sophomore and above

Postcolonial literature is the writing produced by people in or from regions that have escaped the yoke of colonialism. Of course, such a definition raises a number of questions, and during the semester we will grapple with the definition. Our reading will open with several theoretical discussions of postcoloniality, then we will continue with novels and poetry from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The spectre of slavery and its repercussions will reverberate in many of the readings. Through individual projects and a final paper that works with at least one of the theoretical texts and a novel or a book of poetry, students can begin to focus on the area in the field that specifically interests them. Writers may include Chinua Achebe, Isabel Allende, Michelle Cliff, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Lamming, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and Derek Walcott.

In this course we will explore how contemporary theatre and performance engages with politics while also looking at some instances where politics becomes theatrical and performative. We will read works by Brecht, Boal, Edgar, Fugard, Friel, Heaney, Hwang, Kushner, Nottage, Pinter etc. We would also examine the theatricality of political acts like the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests and US presidential election videos, as well as culture jamming activities of groups like "The Yes Men". Our aim, aided by secondary theoretical reflections on these texts and events, is to arrive at an expanded yet rigorous understanding of the three key terms of the course---theatre, performance and politics. Course requirements include regular, substantial readings, class discussions and presentations, and a final research paper.
Sophomores and above.

The word Shakespeare alone is often enough to convey a set of commonly held assumptions about style and eloquence in the English language, British history, the power of dramatic literature, the protocols of theatrical performance, and Renaissance/early modern culture in general--not to mention "the human condition." In this seminar we will work at "unpacking" the Shakespeare icon by undertaking a critical examination of the plays and poetry in the context of 16th- and 17th-century economics, political struggles, ideological shifts, literary history, and the cultural place of the theater as a new and controversial space of representation. Requirements for the course include regular short writing assignments, a modest research paper and a final examination.

An introduction to the literary dimensions of the Bible with an emphasis on the poetry of its narratives. The intent is to develop creative and interpretive skills and to trace some dominant Biblical themes. Required text: The Oxford Study Bible and comparative contemporary commentaries.

In this course we will begin to explore the literature emerging out of postcolonial Africa, looking at novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. With over 40 independent countries and a multiplicity of cultures, any course of this nature can only be an overview. However, we will read a number of important writers of the last fifty years, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, as well as lesser known writers including Tayeb Salih and M.G. Vassanji, and explore some of the problems facing independent African countries.

A dancing table, a blind glass, a tender button. This course examines how modern representations of the inanimate world speak to questions concerning human life, human rights, and the shape of desire, by tracing industrialization?s effects through the horrifying recognition that we, too, have become thing-like. While the human/inhuman distinction has remained a perennial interest to artists, writers, political economists, anthropologists, and philosophers, such an obsession intensified with the rise of industrial capitalism in the early 19th century. Using things as a lens, we will cover such topics as fetishism, reification, the uncanny, and the art-object in order to pursue the strange lives that objects assume in the modern imaginary. At the same time, we will consider how discussions of thingness reflect on systems of exploitation, including slavery, colonialism, and human trafficking. We will explore the processes of producing, collecting, consuming, exchanging as they are described in 19th and 20th century literature, film, and political discourse in order to ask the following: What is the difference between a thing, an object, and a commodity? How have human subjects come to be constituted by the inanimate world around them? How do these narratives of possession-of being possessed by possessions-approach something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption? As a way of answering some of these questions, we will turn to important thinkers and artists on these topics, which will likely include: Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Gertrude Stein, Joseph Cornell, Nathaniel West, Charlie Chaplin, Georges Perec, Ralph Ellison, Muriel Spark, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Donna Harraway, Susan Stewart, and A.M. Homes.

Hollywood films: how are they "written" by directors, performers, scriptcrafters, cameramen and producers? We will view a selection of films featuring directors who stamped Hollywood and us with their visions, often from other cultures. We will also study the direction Hollywood took in interpreting the Depression, War, and Recovery, and the direction stars, writers and designers chose in defining themselves. This is a course in criticism, history and articulate appreciation.

The advanced workshop assumes that students have some experience with writing fiction and are ready for an environment which will challenge them to hone, revise, and distill their craft. A writer begins inspired by dreams, language, a face in a crowd. But inspiration is only the beginning of a writer's work. In this course we'll study form, theme, voice, language, character, and plot. We'll also read and talk about stories by masters of the craft. The aim of the workshop is to help you discover what your stories want to be and fulfill the promise of your original vision.

Prerequisite: ENGL E412 (formerly E532) Beginning Fiction Writing Workshop or equivalent experience. Prerequisite or class level does not apply when course is offered during wintersession.
Open to sophomore and above

How do directors transform fiction into film? In this course we'll see several films and read the novels on which they're based. We'll talk about the ways in which their makers use two very different art forms to render the same (or is it?) material. Taped interviews with contemporary directors, actors, cinematographers and writers will let us hear from the artists themselves. Readings, video screenings, discussions, exercises, final project. Warning: The course involves a good deal of writing, and the films are sexually explicit.

We explore both narrative and nonfiction films and videotapes. We write essays to establish critical standards. We produce personal film essays by raiding the family album of photos and movies. The course thus aims to combine the humanist perspective with a recognition of actual production. We draw our films from many sources. We draw our readings from a wide range of film journals and establish a shelf of reserve reading material in our library.
These sources are incorporated into our discussions and reports. The course requires a class presentation about a film shown and a visual project in film or slides.

In this course, we will be looking at various displays of the human body, focusing on four main arenas: the freak show, the minstrel show, the drag show, and the human zoo. We will focus extensively on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the heyday of human exhibitions, and move forward to current modes of display, which both contest and refigure earlier spectacles. Texts will include theoretical readings, films novels, audio recordings, handbills, stereocard slides, postcards and advertisements. Students will be writing frequent response essays, as well as producing a presentation--both written and oral-- on one particular aspect/enactment of corporeal display. There will also be a final project which will involve students constructing their own displays.

The contradiction and excess, the blurring of the real and the imaginary of magical realism have been associated with particular geographical and cultural environments. We will examine this territorialization of magical realism by comparing the ways in which novels from the "South" -- South America, the Caribbean, Southern U.S. -- formulate the relation of land to individual, familial, and cultural identity. We will also examine how these "counterrealist" regions reflect on the supposed "rationalism" of the North. Works to be considered include novels and essays by: Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, William Goyen. The following information applies to Fall 2012: Section 01 Sophomore and above Section 02 is reserved for incoming Advanced Placement (AP) students. Space may be available during Add/Drop for upperclassmen.

This class brings together in a productive, practical conversation three lines of aesthetic interest: Italian Neo-realism, contemporary influence of Neo-realism, and emerging medium of cell phone cinema. At its center, the class consists of an intensive exploration of Italian Neo-realism through an analysis of their films, the often contentious, always expansive writings of those practitioners, and the writings of their acknowledged cultural compatriots. The workshop uses both cultural studies methodology to reveal the archeology of a social movement and its possible supports for present practice as well as traditional humanities analysis into the limits and depth of an aesthetic expression. Some of the Neo-realist issues considered will be: the relation between documentary and reality; the function of story in realism; the use of time that is, screen time or as Rossellini called it waiting, vs. plot; the cinema of encounter vs. the cinema of escape; the cinema of the ordinary vs. the cinema of spectacle; the ethic of curiosity vs. the ethic of astonishment; and National-Popular content and technology. One of the only facts of Neo-realism is that it was first a practice born of necessity moral, political, and technical and, it was second an aesthetic manifesto. In keeping with that history and Neo-realism's Gramscian ideal of a National-Popular art in terms of content and form, the final assessment will consist of neo-realist films produced by the students in the birth place of the movement using their mobile phones. This final experiment insists that students engage in Neo-realism as not only a fixed historical debate but also as a fluid on-going conversation. To this end, there will also be readings in contemporary expressions of Neo-realism and filmmaking aesthetics of cell phone cinema.

Central to the idea of the course is to help students find ways of connecting the philosophies discussed to one?s concept of self, ethics, artistry, art-work, history, technology, etc. The texts chosen hold a pivotal place with regard to philosophy and literature. Throughout history, many philosophers have drawn upon literary works for their inspirations and ideas such as Plato and Aristotle (poetry, drama); Nietzsche (tragedy, opera), Kierkegaard (Old and New Testament, novel), Heidegger (poetry), Lacoue-Labarthe (theatre), Walter Benjamin (20th century novel, tragic hybrids, poetry) to name a few. The same is true in reverse, that is, many literary artists have taken material from philosophical texts. During the course, students will be exposed to both. In her masterpiece, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues it is not enough to consider the object itself as a 'work'; we ourselves have the capacity to become a ?work.? Less than a hundred years earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche said something similar in his trans-valuation of norms. Students will use the raw material of their own lives and histories and turn this into philosophically informed work. Though they can borrow from the genre, the style and the language of our authors, they are also free to invent new forms. A crucial question to ask ourselves is the meaning of the border of philosophy and literature and how this may impact one?s creative processes as well invention of genre. The interstices of Philosophy and Literature, moreover, impacts other borders we are familiar with such as truth and beauty, technology and art, the useful and the pleasurable, etc. It would be worth exploring these tensions in the duration of the course.

While the punk-new wave musical revolution was brewing in the mid 1970s, underground filmmakers were also embracing the punk spirit of experimentation, a do-it-yourself ethos, and an uneasy, often defiant relationship with all things authoritative or mainstream. This course will trace and map the contours of punk cinema, from its roots in neorealism and the French New Wave, to its branches in the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements of the early 1980s. Time permitting, we?ll look forward to the post-punk era to consider how the legacy of punk informs later film movements such as Dogme 95. Directors we?ll encounter may include: Amos Poe, Alex Cox, Derek Jarman, Slava Tsukerman, Lars von Trier, and Penelope Spheeris. While not a prerequisite, some background in critical film theory will be beneficial in this course, as will a commitment to academic reading, writing, and lively discussion.

Since the early Hollywood years, films have played a major role in the way American mainstream culture inscribes queerness, the many and diverse queer communities, identities, and experiences. This course begins with an examination of earlier representations of Queerness in Hollywood films, tracing Queer cinematic images throughout the early 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We will screen Queer films such as Nazimova's Salome (1922) and The Killing of Sister George (1968) to analyze their representations of queer identiy and examine what they signify to us today. Our examination of queer film will address the following questions: What is gay or lesbian film? What is a queer film? What are the ways in which the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality are interrelated and deployed? The latter half of the course also will examine selected films and documentaries from the new emerging Queer Cinema and a selection of film shorts that are currently running in queer film festivals.

This course provides an in-depth study of three interrelated American female writers who explore the ways in which difference---in gender, class, race and sexual orientation---affects the formation of self. Each of these writers also investigates the influence of place on self-development. We will begin with Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, continue with texts of Willa Cather such as My Antonia, Death Comes to the Archbishop, and The Professor's House, and conclude with Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and/or The Age of Innocence. While offering insight into the construction of multi-faceted selves, the writers simultaneously provide examples of complex narrative modes. These modes help reveal the art of fiction writing. Since the writers set their texts in different parts of America, they together give a broad perspective of American culture. Students will keep journals, write three analytical papers, and take a final exam. Students may elect constructing a final project (with a strong written dimension) in lieu of taking the final exam.

Our tastes--culinary, sartorial, literary, aesthetic-are never simply personal or obviously natural; they are inextricably intertwined with larger political questions about class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation. This course will pay attention to what is at stake in the claims to "good taste," particularly to how assertions of superior taste are linked to notions of social and moral superiority. We will explore the complex relationship between taste and consumption; democracy and distinction; economic and cultural capital. We will be reading a mix of classic U.S. literary, theoretical, and historical texts, as well as seeing some films and considering other visual materials and cultural artifacts. Although we will concentrate on literary case studies, our goal is to think about the course concepts in relation to the arts and our own lives. Also offered as HPSS-C502. Register in the course for which credit is desired.

Professional actor/director Fred Sullivan(Trinity Repertory Company resident artist and RISD Acting Workshop instructor) will guide a company of student actors, designers, stage managers, and construction crew through a workshop process of producing a live play for the stage, culminating in a weekend of public performances of the production. Students in this course will be asked to: audition for, rehearse and perform assigned speaking and/or non-speaking roles; express preferences for leading and/or assisting in design areas (sets, costume, sound, lighting, etc.); accept assigned duties on design, construction and stage management crews; commit to a flexible rehearsal/construction schedule outside of class meetings; and pursue a guided study of the dramaturgical and production elements of the play or plays being produced. Under consideration for this Wintersession production is a selection of short plays by modern masters/ "geniuses" such as Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Thornton Wilder, David Mamet et al. The structure of the selected play will be analyzed for its themes and historic context as well. The play will furthermore be examined for its unique performance techniques and production requirements. Sign up, put on some comfortable clothes and come to the first class ready to play.
Rehearsals are scheduled throughout wintersession as needed.

Where does the notion of our environment stop? Grounded in literary and cinematic texts as well as recent ecocriticism, this course considers the environment at its limits and the attitudes and anxieties represented therein. We will examine poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and films that imagine spaces alien to human life?the Arctic, Chernobyl, and Mars, to name just a few?in order to see the ways in which our understanding of the environment is far from natural. As such, it considers the utopian frontiers of empire and interplanetary exploration as well as dystopian spaces of disaster and gradual decline (global warming). At the same time, this course considers the relation between science, nature and art in order to ask questions like the following: what do uninhabitable spaces teach us about our duties to the world? How do these frontiers, variously imagined as spaces of hope and ruin, represent the uncertainties that accompany a rapidly changing environment? What possible futures do these narratives imagine, and how do they inform our present moment? Texts and films you may encounter in this class include: Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North; Rebecca Baron, The Idea of the North; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Alan Weisman, The World Without Us; Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World; Roland Barthes, ?Martians?; Tetsuo Jimbo, Inside Report from Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Evacuation Zone; Christian Bvk, The Xenotext Experiment; Carl Deal and Tia Lesson, Trouble the Water; T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland; Ian McEwan, Solar; Ken Belford, Decompositions; Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet; Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature.

Visual images of human suffering have a paradoxical duplicity. On the one hand, they are deemed indispensable for raising awareness about human rights abuses: they provide irrefutable evidence, forge connections to distant others, and mobilize sentiment that affirms the notion of universal humanity. On the other hand, they are denounced for presenting only partial truths, inciting spectatorial pleasure, and offering a substitute for meaningful action. This course examines the global circulation of images of suffering and political violence in 20th and 21st century photography and film in order to consider the conceptual and ethical dilemmas that emerge at the intersection of human rights and visual culture. What is the line between education and entertainment, aesthetics and politics, witnessing and voyeurism, dehumanizing abjection and dignifying edification? Is there a difference between documentary and imaginative renderings of issues? And, what might we learn from such images about the way our culture operates?

The Advanced Poetry Workshop is most suitable for students who have completed an introductory creative writing workshop and who wish to further develop projects initiated, sustain a relationship with poetry, and participate in contemporary poetry culture as writer/performer/publisher/editor/collaborator in addition to, or aligned with, studio practice. The workshop builds on experience in previous creative writing workshops in poetry or other writing genre, focusing on the development of a group of poems for performance and/or publication, through workshop critique and individual and collaborative practice.
Sophomore and above

The course will focus entirely on African American theater. We will be concerned with the politics of representation and location, paying close attention to the relationship between the historical moment and the dramatic and performance texts. The meaning of the dramatic texts studied will be linked to their significance and potential social effects. Written largely during periods of turbulent social change, the texts chosen provide an opportunity to reflect on the transformative power of theater. Beginning with a broad overview of the issues and performance traditions impacting African American drama, we will proceed to the major highlights in the evolution of the latter. Notions of race, gender, class, and how these impact the retrieval of black people as speaking subjects will also be examined.

This course will provide an introduction to narrative theory as it relates to the visual and time arts in the production of both documentary and fiction films. We will consider various narrative genres as well as the range of film narrative forms from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Independent to Avant-Garde. To fully understand the practical narrative possibilities of film's technology, we will spend some time in class analyzing and writing adaptations of literature (short stories, poems, performance monologues, novels) for film. Requirements include film screenings; reading from theoretical works, literature, and screenplays; and writing both analytical and practical exercises. There will be an additional screening time scheduled.

We begin with a study of the bird painters, illustrators and photographers, most notably, of course, John James Audubon, and continue with the symbolic bird of poetry and literature, such as Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson--the bird as woman--and examine the bird as omen and warning--the ecological and environmental indicator of human fate. Our books include such recent essays and memoirs as Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals -- an indictment of the poultry industry and a plea for vegetarianism-- and also the arguments both personal/subjective and yet also scientific for the intelligence of birds such as the bestseller books Alex: The Parrot that Owned Me and Wesley the Barn Owl, in which birds appear not so much as pets but rather as companion creatures who share our destiny and condition.

Our course will include actual birdwatching during times of migration or nest-building, either locally within the borders of our campus world, or beyond its frontiers. Migration has always meant the crossing of national barriers, and therefore a promise of peace and order despite the turmoil under the skies. We read, we watch, and we design projects relevant to the various meanings of birds to be found in books.

Beginning with Thomas Gray and ending with Joseph Conrad, we will read and discuss poems, novels, visual art, and essays that explore the idea of modernity, placing them in the context of literary, cultural, and social history. Short papers, a mid-term and a final will be required.

One night, late in the fourteenth century, in a tavern outside London, a quiet little fellow named Geoffrey, so the story goes, joined a lively crew about to ride sixty miles to Canterbury. To entertain themselves on the way, they began a story-telling contest. The premise is fiction; however, the resulting Canterbury Tales offers some of the most memorable poetic narratives ever written. Geoffrey Chaucer (1345-1400), called sometimes the "father" of English poetry, wrote tales of back-alley rendezvous, the lives of knights, saints, and independent women, the misadventures of talking chickens, and more than one scurrilous story about scheming students. Participants in the class will learn to read Middle English as we go (which is not as difficult as it might seem: think Shakespeare with funny spelling). There will be regular quizzes, midterm and final exams, and a modestly researched critical paper.

In this beginning writing course, we will look at contemporary texts that push against the boundaries of traditional literary genres (fiction, poetry, theatre, creative non-fiction, graphic fiction, etc) and blur the lines between those genres as well. Together we will read some of the most exciting contemporary writers who resist our attempts to categorize them. By examining these texts and trying our own creative writing experiments, we will gain a better understanding of what traditional genres are, the techniques they employ, and ways they can be manipulated to create something new.

Cultural studies has made its mark in the humanities as a structured discipline since the 1960s. It emerged from a dissatisfaction with traditional literary criticism and sought to widen the latter's focus on aesthetic masterpieces of "high" culture by incorporating "low," popular, and mass culture in an interdisciplinary analysis of "texts," their production, distribution and consumption. Varied "texts" from the world of art, film, TV, advertising, detective novels, music, folklore, etc. as well as everyday objects, discourses, and institutions have since been discussed in their social, historical, ideological and political contexts. This course will provide an introduction to the field and its concerns. It will also encourage students to practice some of its modes of analysis.

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments.
Required for graduation for all undergraduates, including transfers. There are no waivers for ENGL-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.
For the Fall term, freshmen are pre-registered into this course. Upperclassmen may register for the Spring term by contacting the Liberal Arts Office.

The focus of this course will be a reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost in the context of western narratives that combine creation myths with a philosophical exploration of human subjectivity and agency. Pre-texts will be the Book of Genesis, Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, perhaps a Shakespeare play. The course will conclude by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a response to and extension of this "tradition."

This course will survey the major dramatic conventions and theatrical movements from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, including the naturalism and realism of Ibsen, Shaw and Chekov, the experimental theatres of Brecht, Artaud and Beckett, and contemporary works of postmodern and postcolonial theatre by Churchill, Kushner and Soyinka.

We will study contemporary world narratives-fiction and film-which have been published or produced within the last ten to twenty years. In order to keep up with current work, the specific content of the course will change each year. We will study fiction and film in English and in translation (subtitled). In the past, the assigned fiction has included Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street (Northern Ireland) and Banana Yoshimoto's collection of short stories about contemporary Japan, Lizard. In addition to the assigned reading, we will screen and discuss an international film each week. By the end of the semester, thematic and stylistic links as well as the uniqueness of certain work, like Kore-eda Hirokazu's After Life or Julio Medem's Lovers of the Arctic Circle, will become apparent. Short analytic/interpretive essays in response to the fiction and film and thoughtful class participation are required.
An evening screening time will be scheduled. Students who miss the screening are responsible for seeing the required film before class discussion.

Postcolonial literature is the writing produced by people in or from regions that have escaped the yoke of colonialism. Of course, such a definition raises a number of questions, and during the semester we will grapple with the definition. Our readings will open with several theoretical discussions of postcoloniality, then we will continue with novels and poetry from Australia, India, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Samoa, and Sri Lanka. This history of trading empires and settler colonies will be a major focus in this course. Through individual projects and a final paper that works with at least one of the theoretical texts and a novel or book of poetry, students can begin to focus on the area in the field that specifically interests them. Writers may include Ciaran Carson, Lionel Fogarty, Keri Hulme, R.K. Narayan, Michael Ondaatje, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Albert Wendt.

This course, taught by a working professional actor/director with experience in stage, radio, tv and film, is centered on the belief that speaking skillfully in public is a way to self-discovery, self-improvement and self-confidence. It is also a tenet of this course that skillful public speaking is a fundamental element of a humane society. Students will deliver five major speeches, including self-written speeches of introduction, ceremonial speeches, informative speeches and persuasive speeches. The oral interpretation of literature will also be explored. Each class meeting will require every student's speaking participation in order to develop skills in the areas of voice, diction, managing speech anxiety, research and organization, use of microphones and video, and use of visual aids. The latter phase of this course will focus on concentration, credibility, and familiarity with argument, debate and parliamentary procedure. Attendance at each class is vital and mandatory; furthermore, students will be required to "dress up" for their presentations.

This course examines the way conceptions of race in the U.S. were shaped, and in turn helped shape, relationships to space -- from the perception of "manifest destiny's" expansionism as a civilizing mission against Native American savagery, to fears of racial contamination inciting white flight from urban centers. The course combines key readings in literature and cultural history with an exploration of historical American visual iconographies. These explorations will result in a collaborative temporary monument drawing on various media from steel to video to be sited at the Roger Williams Memorial.
Beginning with a consideration of Roger Williams's A Key into the Language of America (1643), we will investigate the racial histories embedded in Rhode Island's landscapes, and gradually move to considerations of the way these discourses of race and space continue to shape the understanding of U.S. identity and nationalism today. Concepts to be examined include: public space and inclusion/exclusion dynamics; issues of ownership, displacement, and exploitation; the invisibility or unreadability of the mixed race individual; frontier violence and the relationship between race and commercial space in America.
The course includes field-trips throughout Rhode Island.

In "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961), Frantz Fanon writes, "The relations of man with matter, with the world outside, and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food." Fanon recognizes that for the colonized subject existence itself is so threatened that every bit of food one can gain access to is, as he writes, "a victory felt as a triumph for life." The foods people choose to eat and the ways they prepare those foods speak volumes about their relationship to the land and reflect their history. Postcolonial storytellers, writers, and filmmakers use food and foodways as markers of independence, as symbols of cultural colonization, and as signs of continued deprivations. Through foodways one can glimpse famines, invasions, and historical access to trade networks, and food itself can even serve as a vehicle for communication. Since these stories are not constructed in a vacuum, they also can reveal something about what food means in specific historical moments, in specific places, and for specific populations. This course will look at the roles food and foodways play in a series of narratives from formerly colonized spaces. Writers we will read may include Chris Abani, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Sophomore and above

Starting off as a tongue-in-cheek, derivative expression used in the media, today "Bollywood" is increasingly becoming the dominant global description for the prolific Hindi language film industry based in Bombay (recently renamed Mumbai). This course provides a critical introduction to the cultural, social and political significance of this cinema with particular emphasis on recent films that have contributed to the emergence of the "Bollywood" phenomenon and its impact on national and global popular culture. The cinematic imagination and practices of "Bollywood" will be discussed in relation to ideas of nationalism, religion, gender and sexuality, urbanization and development, globalization and diaspora etc.
Sophomores and above.

Tolstoy's famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina reminds us that families provide a lot of good material for fiction and film narratives. "All happy families resemble one another," he writes, "but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This seminar will take a look at unhappy and happy families alike and will consider alternative or surrogate family structures and definitions of home. Contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth, Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to name a few, take us inside homes where identities are formed and where they clash. We will also study family portraiture in film to extend our understanding of the subject's narrative possibilities.
Sophomore and above

This course aims to introduce students to the theory and practice of 21st and 20th century Sound Poetry, primarily in the English language tradition. Students will engage with canonical and contemporary examples, write a conference paper on a practitioner / area of practice / problem of choice and compose and perform new work, individually and/or collaboratively. Concepts considered may include line, silence, noise, meter, rhyme, repetition, assonance, rhythm, tone, volume, authority, articulation, audience, listening, harmony, dissonance. We may also consider relationships and tensions between the aural and visual in poetry; between poetry and language, poetry and silence, language and sound, listening and reading, the eye and the ear; and the multi-dimensional opportunities of performance, live or digital.

Modern Jewish literary form and content developed from the 19th-century emancipation with its socialist, Zionist, and romantic options. We move from these roots to the satiric and elegiac voice of contemporary America. Authors studied will include Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Singer, Elie Wiesel, Bernard Malamud.

This course examines the ways by which media shape our basic understanding of the surrounding environment. We will begin with a historical analysis of the relationship between modes of transportation (boat, horse, train, car) and kinds of media (print, radio, film, digital media) in order to explore how they define and delimit the natural world: how does the environment depend on our modes of conveyance? And how does the environment exceed it? From there, we will explore various articulations of the relationship between technology and nature, paying special attention to the ways in which technology has continued to map and remap our sense of the world. Examining literary and cinematic texts in conjunction with critical theory, we will analyze how technology determines our sense of the natural world and, in addition, how certain technologies become naturalized over time. Readings may include: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media; Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks; Martin Heidegger, "Question Concerning Technology"; Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Kristin Ross,Fast Cars, Clean Bodies; Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection; Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code; Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media; Jussi Parrika, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge; Hari Kunzru, Transmission; Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes. Essays by Neil Postman, William Cronon, Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strauss and Walter Ong.

This course will focus on reading and writing autobiography. Students will read and discuss contemporary essays and memoirs such as Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, Lucy Greely's Autobiography of a Face, Dave Eggers'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, and Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother. Students will write their own autobiographical essays and discuss each other's work.

The digital age not only expands how we read and write, but also broadens our definition of literature. As artists, writers and scholars, we must consider the ways this cultural shift influences how our work is "read". To achieve this aim, we will compose and study writing that conceptually addresses and makes use of digital media. Possible, but not limited, avenues for production include: Interactive Fiction, Writing for Networked Media, Kinetic Poetry, Code Work, Hypertext, Generative Literature, Online Poetics, Virtual/Augmented Reality, Installation, Video, and Sound Poetry. This course will be part writing workshop and part scholarly inquiry. Our reflective writing practice will embrace a three-fold approach: literary production, theoretical discussion, and technical acquisition. Through further emphasis on critical vocabulary and historical foundation, we will deepen our understanding of the craft of writing and the significance of its contemporary permutations.