First-Year Writing Seminars: 2009-2010

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.  For the overview and placement process, please follow links on this page.

If you have questions, please contact Debora Sherman at dsherman@haverford.edu or at 610-896-1255.

Writing Seminars: Individualized (WS-I)

WRPR 102a Justice: A Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Perspective
J. Brooks
TTH 1:00-2:30
Link 205
An exploration of how concepts of justice and criminality are related to cultural and national identity. We will read fiction, philosophy, cultural criticism, and journalism on a wide range of issues - from the O.J. Simpson trial to principles of Islamic Law to motorcycles gangs in Japan - and then examine questions such as: Are concepts of justice universal? What constitutes a just punishment? Is the American judicial system fair? We will have discussions and debates to hone critical thinking and persuasive argumentation skills; we will also examine aspects of the writing process critical for creating effective essays: from generating ideas and interesting theses, to making sure an essay is focused, to editing for clear and precise prose. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester topic-based or discipline-based writing. Enrollment limited to 10 students. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 109a Perspectives on Immigration and Education in the United States
B. Hall
TTH 10:00-11:30
Gest 103
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 145a The Culture of War
P. Gaffney
MW 12:30-2:00
Link 309
This course takes a close look at cultural production about or during times ofwar, with an aim to understand the way particular authors, artists and filmmakers negotiate discourses of nationalism, terrorism, hypermasculinity, the rational and irrational, and the role of the media. The course will focus on WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War, but will also consider similar themes from the post-Cold War era, including the war in the Balkans, and the Gulf and Iraq War. Some of the questions we will consider include: What have been the motivations and justifications for war as represented in these texts and other media? What have been the effects of war on soldiers and on those who remain at home? How does the rhetoric of war shape society and its institutions, even during times of peace? Readings will include works by Stephen Crane, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Aleksandar Hemon, as well as films by Stanley Kubrick and Milcho Manchevksi.

Writing Seminars: Topic-Based (WS-T )

WRPR 109b Perspectives on Immigration and Education in the United States
B. Hall
TTH 10:00-11:30
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. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Social Sciences divisional credit.]

WRPR 110a,b Medical Narratives
S. Benston
TTH 10:00-11:30
Stokes 301
In “To Build A Case” Rita Charon asserts a polarity between the patient’s oral tale and the doctor’s written case history: “They are opposing entities. They are examples of language being used in fundamentally different ways. Their goals conflict.” We’ll test this pronouncement as we read across a spectrum of fiction and nonfiction texts. How does medical language illuminate, and how does it obfuscate, the patient’s individual experience? Do the doctor’s practices of “history-taking” and “case reporting” wrest narrative control from the patient—and, if so, what are the benefits and costs of a usurping authority? Can we detect the patient’s subjective dilemmas finding expression in the doctor’s own struggle for solutions? This course will attempt to place the two supposed narrative opponents into a larger context: a rich assortment of medical story-tellers. What types of medical narrative exist outside the consulting room and the “chart,” and do they effectively reconcile the alleged conflict between patient- and physician-narrator? We’ll look at illness through a variety of lenses, taking our readings not only from standard case reports but from patient memoirs, physician memoirs, medical journalism, essays in philosophy of mind, and (last but hardly least!) literary fiction. We will seek to understand the efficacy of each genre (even, one might say, its therapeutic implications) while training a clear eye on its inevitable evasions and oversights. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 117a,b Reading Culture: Poverty in the United States

M. Ruben

TTH 10:00-11:30
Founders 34
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. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 119b Becoming: Memoirs about Creating a Life in Science or Medicine
C. Schilling
TTH 2:30-4:00
Writing a memoir and doing science or medicine have more in common than might at first seem likely. They share the intellectual pursuit of making discoveries and the ethical value of creating trust. We’ll center our attention on four memoirs. One will be James Watson’s The Double Helix, which describes the work he did in his early twenties that led to the co-discovery of the structure of DNA molecule. Another will be Pauline Chen’s Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, which exposes her struggles to reconcile the depersonalization implicated in medical education with her moral growth. These and other selections (perhaps one that looks back at medicine from the perspective of being ill) will expose some myths about doing science and medicine as they create new ones, but mostly the memoirs will reveal how their writers became interested in their work and dedicated to doing it exquisitely well. These readings will also instigate ethical questions about life writing itself, especially about the responsibilities and complexities of representing one’s self and others to the world. This project will ultimately invite us to explore relationships between composing a story and composing a life.. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 120a Evolutionary Arguments from Darwin to GATTACA
C. Schilling
TTH 2:30-4:00
INSC E309
“. . . I worked to the utmost during the voyage from the mere pleasure of investigation, and from my strong desire to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in natural science.” Charles Darwin, Autobiography (1887) One hundred fifty years ago, Darwin published the results of his pleasurable investigations in The Origin of Species. We will commemorate this anniversary by reflecting on his work and on where his original observations of even the humblest, slowest life forms—coral, earthworms, tortoises, and mould—have taken us today. We’ll begin with Darwin’s carefully crafted arguments that anticipate his contemporaries’ responses to the startling conclusions he drew from the facts he added to natural science. Most unsettling were his revelations about the role of chance in shaping the biological world. Remaining uneasy about the actions of chance, we have added biological facts leading to technologies of genetic control and constructed arguments about the ethical use of this new knowledge. Beginning with selections from Origin and ending with the film GATTACA, we will trace the ways that scientists and others have argued about evolutionary processes and human intervention in them. Along the way, we’ll pause to learn about the eugenics movement of the past and read the arguments of contemporary ethicists on genetic enhancements. We’ll look at the formal structures of the arguments, the language, how they define nature, and how they absorb and create cultural values, myths, and beliefs. In the process, we’ll struggle with a legacy of Darwin’s “few facts”. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 142b Excursions in the Void: Existentialism, Nihilism and Radical Doubt
P. Gaffney
MW 12:30-2:00
This course will explore the ethical, political and aesthetic implications of existentialism with reference to other “moments of doubt” in philosophy and literature, including nihilism and radical doubt. Writing assignments and class discussion will aim at answering questions like the following: What is existentialism good for? Does it constitute a plausible strategy for engaging the complexity, difficulty and ambiguity of everyday experience? Does it represent a purely negative attitude, or can it lead to positive action? Is it a historically specific movement, or a phenomenon that emerges across widely varying periods and forms of expression? Course readings will include short texts, novels and plays by Descares, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 148b 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 106b Children of the Night and Their Music
D.Kight
TTH 11:30-1:00
An examination of monstrosity in literature, film, culture and theory. By focusing on three monster figures that have drawn the attention of a number of authors and film makers—the Vampire, the Creature, and the Double—this course seeks to discover what monsters are, what kinds of fears they embody, how they can be read against each other, and why these figures and their relatives continue to fascinate us. Readings include three novels and a number of other texts (short stories, poems, films, theoretical essays). Prerequisite: Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit.]

WRPR 111b Versions and Adaptations
A. Kosman
TTH 11:30-1:00
Practicing the arts of writing and reading, speaking and listening, in relation to a number of works organized around the theme of adaptation. How do short stories or novels, say, get made into movies, or movies into one another, or novels into one another? What kinds of theoretical issues about the nature of works of art, of genre, of performance, are raised by these works? Several short papers, several long papers, several oral presentations. Works to be considered include: Jane Austin’s novel Emma, Diarmuid Lawrence’s movie Emma, Douglas McGrath’s TV production Emma, Amy Heckerling’s movie Clueless, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s movie A Thousand Acres, Apuleius’ tale Cupid and Psyche, the French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Jean Cocteau’s movie, La belle et la bête, Walt Disney’s musical Beauty and the Beast. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class 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
Link 205
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 members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Natural Sciences divisional credit. Cross-listed as BIOL 122.]

WRPR 128a Reading Sacred Texts: In Quest of the Human
D. Dawson
TTH 10:00-11:30
Gest 102
Religions propose various ways of becoming "fully," "authentically," or "actually" human. Non-religious humanists often counter that religions are not needed to achieve one's humanity, or--in the worst case--positively undermine or destroy it. Taking Christianity as our test case, we'll examine this clash of perspectives and contemplate its implications through reading, discussing, and writing in response to four texts: Augustine's Confessions, Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, and Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Small group writing tutorials will be an important component of the course. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanities divisional credit. Carries credit for the Religion major.]

WRPR 133b The American West in Fact and Fiction
E. Lapsansky
TTH 1:00-2:30
An examination of the imagery of the American West. Using visual and verbal images, this course explores such diverse aspects of the West as cowboys, cartography, water rights, race and social class, technology, religion, prostitution, and landscape painting. Prerequisite: Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Social Science divisional credit.]

WRPR 140b: The Language of Argument
J. Muse
TTH 10:00-11:30
In this course students will learn how to analyze arguments, compose arguments of their own, and write clear, concise, and elegant prose. The first half of the course will relate principles of argument and composition to principles of textual analysis. A good reader can analyze the logic of an argument, the style of its presentation, and the way it solicits its audience. 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, in Act II, scene ii of Hamlet Polonius wastes time while 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 follows his aphorism with a redundant flourish of his own. Like Polonius, when you present your reader with tedious prose you present yourself as tedious. And though few occasions warrant such a presentation, this course will supply students with the power to suit their words to different occasions and the power to read how others in turn both craft themselves and either succeed or fail to convince. The second half of the course will consider the relation between experience and language, between our world and our words. Using the analytic tools assembled during the first half, we will examine works of philosophy and literature that seek to define this relation. Texts will include Plato’s Gorgias, Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense,” and Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula. We will evaluate these works on the basis of their claims about language and on the basis of the language of these claims. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Carries Humanties divisional credit.]

WRPR 144a In Harmony with Nature: Quaker Perspectives on Sustainability
K. Edwards
TTH 10:00-11:30
Link 309
How are Quakers, through their individual lives and group efforts, answering the moral challenges posed by growing economic inequalities and the continuing degradation of the earth’s environment? This seminar will speak to the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, integrity, equality and community, asking how they might inform and help realize more just relationships among peoples and more sustainable living on our planet. We will explore current initiatives by Friends to bear witness to these issues through the political process, appropriate uses of technology, and alternative ways of living with the world. The course will draw on historical and current interpretations of Quaker faith and practice as well as on arguments advanced by Quaker economists, environmentalists, lawyers and lobbyists. [Carries Social Sciences divisional credit.]

WRPR 150a-01 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Marvelous and Monstrous Passions of the West—From Homer to the Holocaust
K. Benston
TTH 10:00-11:30
Stokes 119
Philosopher Walter Benjamin writes: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Western literature--extending from roots in Greek (Homeric) and Judeo-Christian (biblical) traditions--can be read as an extended exploration of Benjamin's insight, unfolding as a debate about its own ability to fashion and transmit meaning in a world often governed by chance, cruelty, and confusion. Through stories pitting heroic energies against mysterious challenges—stories of traumatic violence and passionate restoration, of travel into the unknown and quest for sanctuary—bardic wordsmiths, priestly mythographers, epic poets, experimental novelists, and modern autobiographers have alike tested and transformed traditional values as a means of mastering experience. This course will explore how Western literary culture creates itself by confronting its own dreadful limits and creative possibilities, as each great text reworks its predecessors through a blend of inspiration and repudiation. Works studied will include: Homer’s The Odyssey; Genesis; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Shelley’s Frankenstein; Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave; and Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. . 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: The Gaze of Narcissus
R. Sheehan
TTH 1:00-2:30
Hall 106
This course traces the myth of Echo and Narcissus and the tropes it generates through major works of English literature. Narcissus’ deadly desire for his own reflection becomes a metaphor in Western Literature for issues surrounding representation and authorship from Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” to Alexander Pope’s imitations, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as well as the mirrors that function in the 20th century poetics of Sylvia Plath and James Merrill. We will begin with Ovid’s “Echo and Narcissus,” concentrating on issues of self-reflexivity and representation at the story’s core. The remainder of the course will be structured thematically around the topics of mimesis, the anxiety of artistic influence, originality, the problem of self-representation, Realism and the split-subject. The course will conclude by considering the involvement of the myth in debates surrounding the visual arts of the 19th and 20th centuries that coincide with the inventions of photography and film. Here, we will ask how the theme of the double and of mimesis in English literature is impacted by new technologies of visual reproduction. 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 150b-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 Dante’s Inferno to Shakespeare’s ghost-ridden Hamlet; Wordsworth’s technik of memory in The Prelude; Woolf’s elegy for her parentsin 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 (the poem that remembers for you); 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 150b-03 In the Wake of War: Literary Representations of Violence and its Aftermath
T. Tensuan
TTH 10:00-11:30
This course focuses on literary representions, reconsiderations, and recontextualizations of cultural conflict. We will focus on the following questions: how does war transform individual and national identities? How do genres like the epic poem or the comic book make manifest cultural values? What role does literature play in processes of memorialization and of protest? Writing assignments will range from informal group journals, to analytic and creative essays, to graphic novellas. Texts include: Homer, The Odyssey; Shakespeare, Richard III; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Art Spiegelman, Maus vols. 1 and 2; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. We will also read selections from the work of Susan Sontag, Joe Sacco, Anthony Swofford, Grace Paley, Jonathan Shay, and Howard Zinn. 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 150b-04 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Encountering the Unknown
G. Stadler
TTH 1:00-2:30
This is a course in the critical reading of literary narrative. Reading texts from Homer’s Odyssey to a contemporary novel, we will concentrate on the structural mechanics of narratives as they encounter different sorts of chaos, turmoil, indecipherability, and strangeness—both psychological and social, individual and cultural. While developing an effective toolbox of critical concepts, we will persistently discuss questions concerning literary language’s resources as a social force and in transmitting history. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. 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.]

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)