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.]

WRPR 132a Carnival in Performance from the Acropolis to Mardi Gras
M. Shafer
TTH 10:00-11:30
Gest 103
Poverty is one of the most persistent problems and controversial issues in the United States. Along with its obvious economic dimensions, poverty has a wide variety of cultural meanings. In fact, the subject of poverty forces us to think critically about how we define and understand the concept of culture. Through a selective critical examination of fiction and nonfiction works addressing the theme of poverty in America, this course will explore key methods for studying and writing about culture. It will look at how poverty and poor people have been discussed and represented in the United Sates at various points during the last 125 years, and it will provide an opportunity to explore the many ways "poverty" and "culture" intersect and interact, each term affecting the meaning of the other. Readings from Horatio Alger, Sandra Cisneros, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington, Jacob Riis, and Richard Wright. 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 Humanities 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 110b Medical Narratives
S. Benston
TTH 10:00-11:30
This course will focus on how the experience of illness can disrupt our sense of what a person is. We’ll explore numerous compelling works of fiction, autobiography, philosophy, and medical reportage, asking how each text evokes an existence consumed by, and at the same time distinct from, a wrenching affliction. What do our struggles––whether as patient or as care-giver––teach us about the mind-body interface? How effectively can a narrative transmit the complex experience of suffering? In class discussions and writing assignments we’ll practice the technique of close reading, studying the manipulations of language practiced by our array of dextrous authors (such as Martin Amis, Gail Godwin, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Audre Lorde, Nancy Mairs, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Sacks, and Abraham Verghese). Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities 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 119b Becoming: Life Writing about Medicine and Science
C. Schilling
TTH 1:00-2:30
This seminar brings together two seemingly dissimilar activities: writing about a life and making a life in medicine or science. Yet life writing—a term that includes autobiography, memoir, the personal essay, biography, blog, and more—and practicing medicine and science have more in common than might at first seem likely. They share the intellectual pursuit of making discoveries, the ethical challenge of creating trust, and the act of making choices. The examples of life writing that we read will include first-person essays by physicians, such as Atul Gawande, who interrogate the complicated ethics of treating patients while learning to become a physician. Audrey Young’s memoir The House of Hope and Fear will engage us in her moral and professional growth as a new physician practicing in a hospital that serves the poor and homeless. James Watson’s memoir The Double Helix offers us a personal—some say ethically challenged—perspective on a landmark event in science: how he and others elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule. As we read, we’ll instigate questions about life writing itself, especially the responsibilities and complexities of representing one’s self and others to the world. The final course project will ask you to practice a form of life-writing by interviewing a practicing physician or scientist, researching the kind of work he or she pursues, and composing a biographical profile of that person. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 121b Magic and Metaphysics
J. Ramey
TTH 11:30-1:00
Can we believe in magic? Is it a betrayal of reason, science, and progress to take the supernatural seriously? If ours is a thoroughly disenchanted world, in which technology works whether we want it to or not, how can we explain our cultural obsession with entities that are there only if we believe in them--that is to say, with vampires and werewolves, zombies and wizards, fairies, elves, and a certain boy named Harry? In this course, we will embark on an investigation into the rich history and contemporary proliferation of debates surrounding the possibility and promise of the supernatural. Drawing on works of anthropology, esotericism, philosophy, literature, film, and other media, we will explore some of the more prominent strains of magical belief and practice, as well as some of the metaphysical perspectives that tend either to support or defy the world of magic. 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
MW 2:30-4:00
“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 125a The Nature of Money
J. Ramey
TTH 10:00-11:30
Money is one of the most enigmatic of things. On the one hand it seems to be an utterly banal and concrete aspect of everyday life, and yet on reflection money turns out to be one of the most ephemeral, spiritual, and even magical things in the world. The recent financial crisis has led, among other things, to a flowering of debate over and experimentation with the nature of money itself. In keeping with the urgent sense felt by many within and without the academy that fundamental concepts of economy must be reconsidered, in this class we will take a distinctly philosophical approach to the concept of money, working through some of the historical, structural, religious, and erotic dimensions of exchange in an attempt to gain greater understanding of the role money has played and continues to play in everyday life. Readings for the course include (but may not be limited to) selections from Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share, Norman O. Brown's Filthy Lucre, Georg Simmels' Philosophy of Money, and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 132b Carnival in Performance from the Acropolis to Mardi Gras
M. Shafer
TTH 2:30-4:00
This course examines carnival and the carnivalesque in several cultural contexts, from the theatre festivals of ancient Greece to Mardi Gras in contemporary New Orleans. How, when, and why do societies create space for carnival performances of masking and celebration? Can such performances incite social change, or do the temporary transgressions of carnival ultimately reinforce existing structures of power? Together, we will explore an array of carnival practices in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with a particular focus on the relationship between carnival and theatre. Course readings will include theoretical and historical studies of carnival alongside plays by Euipides, Aristophones, Carlo Goldoni, Wole Soyinka, and others. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 135a American Autobiography: Inscribing Identify and Recasting History
T. Tensuan
TTH 11:30-1:00
How do acts of self-representation create – or contest – notions of collective identity? How do constructions of gender, race, and class inform inscriptions of individual memories, familial histories, and national mythologies? What are the generative tensions between competing visions in graphic narratives as well as in “straight” autobiographies? In this course, we will read a range of texts which foreground conceptual and political issues regarding the art of self-inscription. In our discussions of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Alison Bechdel’s “tragicomic” Fun Home, and Art Spiegleman’s graphic narrative of his family’s experiences in Hitler’s Europe and in a post-W.W. II United States, we will investigate the ways in which different works cast authorial personas and make claims regarding the truth of one’s own (and other’s imagined) experience. In studying Malcolm X’s conversion narrative alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir of a “girlhood among ghosts” and Gary Soto’s stories of growing up Chicano in the contested territories of California, we will look closely at how these narratives negotiate constructions of gender, class, and race in relation to the rhetorics of individual and national identity. Our turn to the work of Eric Michaelswill enable us to reflect on the interrelations between the configuration of one’s environment and the constitution of one’s body, as well as on our own acts of writing, reading, and interpretation. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 141b The Future of the Book in the Digital Age
J. Mercurio
TTH 1:00-2:30
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, John Updike and Nicholson Baker argue that print crucially safeguards the individuality of the author's voice and the survival of the text. 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 Frans Masereel’s novel in woodcuts Mon Livre d’Heures, Italo Calvino’s recursive novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s interactive digital narrative Inanimate Alice, and Vladimir Nabokov’s re-arrangeable narrative The Original of Laura. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

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 may include works by Herman Melville, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, and Italo Calvino, Quentin Tarantino and Spike Jones. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

Writing Seminars: Discipline-Based (WS-D)

WRPR 113b Madness and Monstrosity in Greek Myth
D. La Londe
TTH 10:00-11:30
In this course we consider the role of madness in Greek mythology, with a focus on its representation in Greek tragedy. We explore the nature and origins of madness in characters like Heracles and Cassandra, and consider the role of this motif in Greek tragedy. Among the questions we will consider are these: Is madness ever a good thing? What are the symptoms of madness, and how do other characters regard it? Why does madness feature so prominently in Greek mythology and Greek tragedy in particular, and what is the significance of the fact that the god Dionysus is both patron of tragedy and god of ecstasy and intoxication? We focus on Greek tragedy from 5th century BCE Athens (e.g., Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Ajax, Euripides' Heracles and Bacchae) with selections from other classical texts, such as Homer’s Iliad, Plato's Phaedrus, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Prerequisite: Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 122a Writing in Public Health
J. Owen
TTH 10:00-11:30
The study of public health and the development of public health policy are multidisciplinary activities which engage students and practitioners in the areas of science, medicine, mathematics, public policy, economics and politics. This course will address both national and global public health issues. In the first half of the semester, students will read and write about the increasing rate at which Americans are afflicted with type 2 diabetes, analyze why it preferentially affects certain racial and ethnic groups and develop their own ideas about how to ameliorate this incipient public health disaster. The second half of the course will focus on the ongoing problem of infectious disease in America and in the countries of the third world. Despite more than a century of research, we have still not solved the global health problems associated with influenza, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. Students will learn about the biology of some of these diseases and study the mechanisms which are currently being used to minimize their impact on the health of different populations. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Naatural Sciences divisional credit. Cross-listed as BIOL 122a.]

WRPR 128b Reading Sacred Texts
K. Koltun-Fromm
MW 12:30-2:00
This course will explore how Islam, Christianity, and Judaism represent the sacred in biblical, medieval, and modern culture. We will investigate a wide range of texts, including written works, photography, images, icons, film, and sculpture. Reading sacred texts is a visual practice, and we want to understand better how perception, idolatry, and representation in all three traditions inform notions of the sacred. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries credit toward the Religion major. Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 150a-01 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Fatal System Error: When Literary Investigations Go Awry
A. Boone
TTH 10:00-11:30
The practice of literary analysis is founded upon the practice of close reading, of paying minute attention to small details and building an argument about meaning based on patterns of these particularities. This first-year writing seminar will follow literary characters who conduct their own close readings of situations and texts—only to find that misinterpretations and mistakes litter the path of literary investigation. The class will begin with Anne Carson’s translation of Elektra and her contemporary poetry about failure and “the willful creation of error / the deliberate break and complication of mistakes / out of which may arise / unexpectedness.” With Carson’s provocations in mind, the class will consider William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as texts that dramatize the unexpected error that can arise in mediating information through mishearing, gossip, lies, misprinting, mistranslation, misjudgment, and misinterpretation. These unexpected, unpredictable errors—which are sometimes noticeable only through close reading, but which may also be exacerbated by this minute attention—can generate fascinating questions about the nature of our pursuit of knowledge. Students will write and revise short 4-6 pp. essays about these texts, including an essay how one of these texts has been adapted in contemporary media and how errors (say, in conflating Frankenstein and his monster in the popular imagination) have strange afterlives. 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 105b-01 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Memory: The Use(s) of the Past
D. Sherman
TTH 10:00-11:30
Frequently in his descent into the Inferno, Dante is accosted by those who ask of him but one thing: “[W]hen you return to earth’s sweet light,/ Recall my memory there to the human world.” What is memory that it should be so grievously lost? What are its uses? What is its use or value? Through different works across the curriculum, we will press the issue of narrative representation in terms of its capacities to revisit, to remember, to recollect and the subsequent revision of that memory into text. How does narrative “remember”? Is memory coterminous with self? Can memory betray self? And is memory only ever singular and individual or multiple and plural--can there be a cultural practice of memory? We will pursue these questions through Virgil's retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to Milton's great elegy, "Lycidas"--both paradigms for memory--to Shakespeare’s competing histories in The Tempest; Wordsworth’s technik of memory in The Prelude; Woolf’s elegy for her parents in To the Lighthouse (“I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind”); T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland which remembers literature past, and selected critical essays, Freud, Caruth, etc. The focus of the course will be on close reading and critical analysis in short essays, revised and reworked in small group tutorials. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit. Carries credit for 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 150b-02 Introduction to Literary Analysis: The Haunting and the Horrific: Tales of Ghosts and Monsters
M. Shafer
TTH 11:30-1:30
This course examines the role of ghosts and monsters in western literature and drama, exploring their relationship to questions of history, memory, identity and repetition. Why do tales of the otherworldly pervade stories from cultures around the world? What can these stories tell us about our relationships to the visible and invisible worlds around and within us? Together, we will investigate what ghosts ask of us, and what the monstrous “other” may reveal about ourselves. Course texts may include literary and dramatic works by Aeschylus, William Shakespeare, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Charles Ludlam and Toni Morrison read through the critical lenses of psychological, theoretical, historical, and anthropological studies of haunting, the grotesque and the uncanny in studies by Sigmund Freud, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Julia Kristeva, Alice Rayner and Joseph Roach among others. 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-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.]

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