Courses

A few things to keep in mind:

• Your first-year writing seminar need not be linked to your anticipated major or demonstrated strengths (although it can be). While all seminars are rigorous, they are also introductory; none assumes prior experience in a particular subject matter. Consider the seminar an opportunity to expand your intellectual life and don’t be afraid to venture into new territory.
• For writing seminars, differences in course numbers do not signal differences in course difficulty. All topic-based and discipline-based courses include approximately the same amount of reading and writing
• An "a" after the course number indicates that the seminar will be taught in the fall; a “b” indicates spring. The Writing Seminar can be taken in either semester.
• Please refer to the welcome letter online for an overview of the placement process and for an explanation of the differences between the three kinds of Writing Seminars (WSI, WST, WSD). You can submit both your seminar preferences and placement essay using an online form. Please refer to the placement page for more details.

Writing Seminars: Individualized (WS-I)

WRPR 104a American Dream: Ethnographic Perspectives on the United States
B. Hall
TTH 11:30-1:00
While most people would agree that the United States is a “diverse” country in many ways, this course asks the question: what does American “diversity” really mean? In particular, what does it mean to be an American when the United States includes people of so many different ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic groups, such varying lifestyles, and such divergent political opinions? What, we will ask, are some of the different ways to be American, and what, if anything, do they have in common? What separates and unifies a nation with so many different kinds of American dreams? This course will offer students opportunities to explore various ways of being American through an ethnographic exploration of various American sub-cultural groups. While this course will focus primarily on helping students to master various aspects of academic writing at the college level, we will also contextualize our ethnographic reading by learning about ethnographic research methods, and will have the opportunity use these methods as well. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester topic-based or discipline-based writing. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Social Sciences divisional credit.]

WRPR 109a Perspectives on Immigration and Education in the United States
B. Hall
TTH 2:30-4:00
The primary goal of this course is to challenge students as academic readers, writers and thinkers while providing support for continuous growth. We will immerse ourselves in the historical, social, cultural, political, linguistic, and various other contexts of immigration to the United States, with a focus on salient issues relating to k-12 public education. What kinds of experiences, we will ask, have immigrant students had in American schools in the past century? Have schools served this population well? How are schooling and citizenship related? Does public education facilitate or hinder immigrant students in attaining the "American dream" of success and fortune? How do various kinds of educational practice (like bilingual education, English as a Second Language instruction, and contemporary multicultural education) marginalize or empower immigrant students? Readings for the course will include a wide variety of perspectives on these issues, and to that end will include academic articles, ethnographic texts, autobiographical writing, and fiction. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester topic-based or discipline-based writing. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Social Sciences divisional credit.]

Writing Seminars: Topic-Based (WS-T)

WRPR 104b American Dreams: Ethnographic Perspectives on the United States
B. Hall
TTH 11:30-1:00
While most people would agree that the United States is a “diverse” country in many ways, this course asks the question: what does American “diversity” really mean? In particular, what does it mean to be an American when the United States includes people of so many different ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic groups, such varying lifestyles, and such divergent political opinions? What, we will ask, are some of the different ways to be American, and what, if anything, do they have in common? What separates and unifies a nation with so many different kinds of American dreams? This course will offer students opportunities to explore various ways of being American through an ethnographic exploration of various American sub-cultural groups. While this course will focus primarily on helping students to master various aspects of academic writing at the college level, we will also contextualize our ethnographic reading by learning about ethnographic research methods, and will have the opportunity use these methods as well. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester topic-based or discipline-based writing. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Social Sciences divisional credit.]

WRPR 118a Portraits of Disability and Difference
K. Lindgren
TTH 2:30-4:00
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes: “staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange.” In this seminar we will explore visual and literary portraits and self-portraits of bodies marked by difference, bodies that often elicit stares. We will ask: What kinds of stories are told about these bodies? How do memoirs and self-portraits by people with disabilities draw on and challenge traditions of life writing and portraiture? How does this work enlarge cultural and aesthetic views of embodiment, disability, and difference? How do portraits of disability engage differences of gender, race, and class? Our class will host two visiting artists and work closely with the fall 2012 exhibition “What Can a Body Do?” in Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Through close readings of essays, memoirs, paintings, and photographs, students will hone their descriptive and interpretive skills and develop their ability to craft clear and persuasive arguments. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 124a, b Writing and the Senses
T. Devaney
TTH 11:30-1:00
“What I am trying to translate,” Cezanne said, “is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being.” Reading our senses requires interpretation. What do the senses teach us about ourselves? How do they help us understand who we are in our sense-saturated world? How do the senses simultaneously inform each other? What on-going problems do they pose and which do they help us resolve? Writing and the Senses is a course that will help you to become a more effective and sophisticated writer using the five senses as a focus. The mode of the class is “close reading” and the analysis of text combined with the exploration of how our sense-data provides insight into the cognitive, biological, and spiritual aspects of our human nature. The seminar is designed to sharpen and broaden your senses and sensibilities via expository writing. Readings include selections from Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf, Letters on Cezanne by Rainer Maria Rilke, Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, and How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher. The class will also have the opportunity to take a field trip to The Barnes Foundation. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 140a WRPR 140a The Rhetoric of Argument
J. Muse
TTH 10:00-11:30

Polonius: My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?

Queen: More matter with less art.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii.86-93; Polonius to the King and Queen

In this course you will learn how to write clear, concise, and elegant prose, analyze arguments, and compose arguments of your own. A good reader can analyze the logic of an argument, the way it solicits its audience, and the style of its presentation. Similarly, the good writer understands her audience, adopts a style appropriate to the situation, and crafts an argument that establishes grounds for possible agreement. A good writer is a better reader. For example, above, Polonius wastes time saying he won’t: “since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes / I will be brief…” He can’t even speak briefly of brevity but lards his own aphorism with redundant flourishes. If, like Polonius, you present your reader with tedious prose, you present yourself as tedious. And though few occasions warrant such a presentation—Shakespeare here expertly portrays Polonius’ lack of expertise—this course will supply you with the means to suit your words to different occasions and the power to read how others in turn both craft themselves and thus either succeed or fail to convince.

WRPR 141a, b The Future of the Book in the Digital Age
J. Mercurio
TTH 11:30-1:00
Jeff Jarvis bluntly declared in 2005: "Print is where words go to die," asserting that the dynamism and hypertextuality of digital media render books and other print formats obsolete. On the other hand, William H. Gass and Christine Rosen argue that physical books crucially safeguard the individuality of the author's voice and the deep immersion of their readers. This seminar will engage the debate by exploring what the book represents today—both as a means of communication and as a physical artifact—while seeking to envision the future of books and e-books from the perspective of its readers, authors, publishers, printers, illustrators, and conservators. We'll start by placing the current digital revolution against the backdrop of revolutions and evolutions in the methods of textual transmission from ancient papyri to the printing press to early experiments in print hypertextuality. With this new appreciation of prior upheavals, we'll ask whether the print-versus-digital debate represents a false dichotomy, or whether the shift to digital media signals a fundamental transformation in how society organizes and transmits information. To find our answers, we will explore several fascinating textual experiments that illustrate the limitations and possibilities of physical and digital books––such texts as Lynd Ward’s novel in woodcuts God’s Man (1929), Italo Calvino’s recursive novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s hologramatic work of poetry Between Page and Screen (2012), and Chris Ware’s multi-format graphic novel Building Stories (2012).

WRPR 148a,b Innovation, Rebellion, and Dissent
J. Benatov
WF 2:30-4:00
What motivates people to rebel? This course examines the notions of originality and dissent from both a social and an aesthetic perspective. Our readings and analyses during the semester will demonstrate that there is no clear-cut separation between these two spheres and that artistic and social idiosyncrasy are mutually constitutive elements. Readings include works by Herman Melville, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Italo Calvino, and films by Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, and Milos Forman.

WRPR 157a WRPR 157b The Politics and Poetics of Punishment
R.Lerner
TTH 11:30-1:00
Though a nation founded on the principles of freedom, the United States incarcerates more people (both per capita and in toto) than any other country in the world, past or present. Why does our society punish? What are the goals of punishment and what are the mechanisms by which punishment seeks or fails to achieve these goals? This seminar begins with an attempt to come to terms with how and why mass incarceration has taken its current form in the US; we will read works from thinkers such as Michelle Alexander, Bernard Harcourt, Loic Wacquant, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Elaine Scarry, and Michel Foucault. We’ll think about how incarceration works to form and deform both body and mind and, in its self-proclaimed capacity to effect social death and individual rebirth, examine the religious origins of our modern ideas of punishment. The second section of this course will be dedicated to representations of guilt and punishment in literature, philosophy and film: excerpts from Plato and Nietzsche; narratives of civil disobedience from Thoreau; poems by Emily Dickinson; Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. We will also read great works written by incarcerated thinkers, such as Antonio Gramsci, Malcolm X, Etheridge Knight, and Angela Davis. The second half of the course will allow us to ask how artistic representations of guilt and punishment offer us a different vocabulary for analyzing how punishment is alternatively represented and hidden from view, everywhere visible and yet naturalized to the point where it is barely thought about. Collectively, we’ll work to develop strategies for reading and viewing texts from different fields closely, and learn to write about the issues they address with nuance and sophistication.

Writing Seminars: Discipline-Based (WS-D)

WRPR 105b-01 Introduction to Literary Analysis: "Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination"
C. Zwarg
TTH 1:00-2:30
The hallucination we call reality has captured the imagination of many authors, and this course explores that haunting register across a variety of literary forms. Beginning with a translation of Homers Odyssey, we will consider how theories of translation can inform our understanding of the realities with which writers contend. If we all live in language, what genres of living might emerge? How does a writer like Shakespeare help us to experience those props, especially when we need a dictionary and lots of footnotes to understand them? (Can a dictionary be read like a poem?) What is the reality at work in the novels of Jane Austen and why do people love losing themselves there? (What does it mean to lose yourself in reading?) Can the supreme fictions of Wallace Stevens help us out? Is an Emerson essay really a crazy salad? What ghosts from Homer and Shakespeare return when Derek Walcott stages the Odyssey through the haunting registers of Caribbean history? Emphasis on rereading and writing as pleasure zones for discoveries of thought. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit. Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 150a-01 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Animate Objects
L. Reckson
TTH 10:00-11:30
From the flesh of Pygmalion’s statue to the circuits of artificial intelligence, this course examines the literature of animation, or things coming to life. How can we understand the complex, often amorous relationships between persons and things, and what is the role of literature in helping us to imagine, navigate, and reconstruct those relationships? Working with classical and modern texts in a variety of genres, we’ll explore historically specific constructions of personhood, analyzing how language shapes and reshapes the boundaries between subjects and objects, the living and the dead, the still and moving. We’ll examine the role of race and gender in configuring relations of power, objectification, and commodification. And we’ll ponder our own role as writers in bringing ideas and concepts to life, attending carefully to the pleasure and responsibility this work entails. Beginning with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we’ll explore the work of animation in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2. Selected short critical readings from Sigmund Freud, Barbara Johnson, Jaron Lanier, and Karl Marx will help us approach humans and things through questions of desire, production, technological transformation, enslavement, and mourning. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit. Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 150a,b-02 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Reading Madness
A. Bennett
TTH 11:30-1:00
Crazy, hysterical, paranoid, sick: this course focuses on literature in which characters acquire such labels by interpreting their surroundings, experiences or symptoms in ways that cause others to question not only their perceptions, but even their sanity. Why are we compelled repeatedly to tell this story? We will pursue this question by considering how such stories function at different historical moments and across various genres, including the Greek tragedy, the gothic novel, and the horror film. Our range of texts will include Sophocles' Oedipus the King; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw; poems by John Keats and Emily Dickinson; stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vladimir Nabokov; and Todd Haynes’s film Safe. Across these texts, we will map how labels such as madwoman or madman have been used to mark boundaries of behavior, expression and thought, often related especially to changing conceptions of gender and sexuality. At the same time, we will explore the spaces of reinvention richly rendered in literary presentations of madness—spaces that authors variously discourage or invite us, as readers, to enter. As we reflect on the different ways of acting, interpreting and reading that are portrayed, along with the labels invoked in response, we will also consider our own interpretive practices and standards of evidence, including those of our daily lives and those within the discipline of literary studies. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit. Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 150a,b-03 Introduction to Literary Analysis: The Poetics of Power
B. Riebling
TTH 11:30-1:00
This writing course is designed to develop students’ critical reading and analytical writing skills while introducing them to the discipline of literary studies. Our thematic focus explores ideas about power as they are reflected in selected literary texts, ranging from ancient Greece to the modern era, examining concepts about power in the context of those who are traditionally empowered and “from the bottom up,” listening to the voices of those who feel power’s effects and inequities most acutely. Among the issues we will discuss are: What is power? Where does it originate? What are power’s effects? How does power relate to the central categories of race, gender, and class? What role does religion play in struggles for power? As we tackle these and many more questions, we will be seeking both perennial and carefully historicized answers to the problems power raises, looking for “universals” while differentiating between our contemporary experiences and lives far removed from our own in circumstance, distance, and time. Among the works we will discuss are Homer’s Odyssey, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life, and James Joyce’s Dubliners. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit. Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 156a Good Guys and Gals? Quaker Imagery in Fiction
E. Lapsansky
TTH 10:00-11:30
What have been the literary “uses” of Quaker ideas and images in fiction? How have these changed over time? Fiction-writers often use codified images such as Biblical characters, landscapes, serpents or other animals, in order to promote a certain mood or sub-text in their readers' minds. And religion is often the overt or hidden agenda for fiction-writers—with the “journey” through life, its concomitant challenges, and the conquest of those challenges bringing the reader to a dramatic conclusion. But Quakers, so few in number (only a few hundred thousand of us in the entire world!) don’t show up in fiction very often. This is partly because early Quakers banned the writing and reading of fiction. Yet, as early as 1810, Quakers DO appear in fiction—both as authors and characters. Here on the Haverford campus, with its Quaker heritage and traditions, is housed perhaps the largest collection of “Quaker” novels anywhere in the world—fiction by or about Quakers, often populated with characters whose “Quakerliness” is designed to evoke a certain mood, message, or subtext. For some authors, Quakers became stand-ins for virtue. For others, the Quaker image is of the troublemaker, the nay-sayer, the haughty, unbending zealot. In this course we will read excerpts from an array of Quaker fiction. Then, through class discussions, written essays, and through considering each others’ writing, students will explore how commentators have interpreted the meaning of "Quakerness" in literature." Though this is not a “history” course per se, students will emerge from the course with sharpened skills in historical inquiry and research.

Courses at Bryn Mawr College

(These courses do not fulfill the writing requirement at Haverford but are open to Haverford students as space is available.)
English 125 Writing Workshop
English 126 Writing Workshop for Non-Native Speakers of English
English 220 Writing in Theory/Writing in Practice: The Study of the Teaching of Writing(Also listed as Education 220)

• About Placement/Overview
• Guide to Writing Seminars (Courses)
• Placement Essay Instructions
• Online Seminar Preference and Essay Form
• Download the entire placement packet