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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2019 |
Registration ID | EMLYB001029 |
Course Title | Emily Balch Seminars-Narratives of Transgression |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Emily Balch Seminars |
Instructor | Sessions,Gabriel |
Times and Days | TTh 11:25am-12:45pm
|
Room Location | TAYF |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2774 The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at Bryn Mawr to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it. These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives. Current topic description for Narratives of Transgression: Adultry, Cheating, and Plagiarism: Adultery—defined perhaps most broadly as the improper mixture of two elements which do not belong together—is one of the oldest taboos that govern human behavior. Adultery prohibitions stand at the origin of nearly all ethical systems, whether in legislative codes, religions, or philosophy; adultery is also a favorite topic of literary texts. This course will puzzle out why we write so many stories about disobedience: is a story, versus a trial or a sermon, say, uniquely able to forgive or condemn someone for violating certain boundaries and breaking certain rules? Traditionally, adultery means romantic or sexual infidelity, but it also might refer to other types of rule-breaking centered on combining things that "don't belong together": mixed relationships across racial and class boundaries, closeted sexualities, forgery, perjury, and plagiarism, the adultery of different forms of writing or intellectual property. Our class' broader goal in looking at the way people write and direct films about transgression will be to examine how narrative is shaped by the legal, religious, and political atmosphere in which it is created, circulates, and reaches its audience. Our texts will range from Antigone to The Great Gatsby to Game of Thrones to Call Me By Your Name. Our emphasis will be on close reading as a critical practice—learned and honed through repetition—as we discover how literary and aesthetic forms “make sense" how they create, refract, and reproduce the world. By the end of the course, you will have learned how to read deeply and thoughtfully, how to edit and revise efficiently, and how to engage each other’s critical writing with a high level of attention, curiosity, and animated inquiry in peer editing and review. |
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