WRPR 101A 01,02 Finding A Voice: Identity, Environment, and Intellectual Inquiry
N. Lavda
MW 12:45-2:15; 2:15-3:45
This course considers students fluid relationship to identities that they examine, explore, and take on through course materials. We begin by examining how difference is perceived/obscured/challenged and/or bridged in constructions of identity. We then consider how identities exist in the physical environment and how environment affects these identities. In particular, we will look closely at the debate concerning hydraulic gas fracturing, or fracking. Haverford Colleges location in Pennsylvania, home of the Marcellus Shale and location of many fracking sites, makes this topic especially relevant. The different positions that experts have taken in the debate about fracking serve as a model, finally, for students to enter another scholarly debate within an area of interest in a possible prospective major. In this later stage of the course, students try on the identity of a major and examine how to think and write like someone in that prospective major. This course involves significant reading, writing, and research. You will learn how to move between several different kinds of writing: from writing to express yourself to writing to communicate with an audience, to take a position on a written text, to create arguments and counter-arguments, to learn scholarly research skills, to learn interview and presentation skills, and to develop your own voice through your writing and speaking in order to participate more fully in the work of intellectual inquiry. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second semester writing seminar. 

WRPR 167A001 Globalization and Culture in the 21st Century
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 define and explore global interconnectedness from multiple disciplinary perspectives - political, economic, etc. - but will focus primarily on various complex social and cultural dimensions of globalization including local/global tensions, Westernization, cultural borrowing, cultural imperialism, cultural exploitation, tourism, and pop culture (music, movies, etc.), as analyzed in ethnographies set in various locations around the world. Most of these locations will be outside the US, and we will include a particular case study of Japan. We will consider questions like: Is there a global village? How does the nation-state matter both more and less in a globalized world? How does globalization impact existing socioeconomic inequalities? Who benefits from increasing global interdependence and who does not, and why? This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester writing seminar. 

WRPR 195A001 Multilingualism and Multilingual Identity
S. Bien-Gund
TTH 2:30-4:00
This course is designed to prepare first year students to read as writers, write as readers, and hone analytical and argumentative capacity. We will do this by investigating multilingualism in diverse communities and contexts, primarily within the United States and with an initial case study based in Morocco. Over the course of the semester, we will engage with questions such as: What does it mean to know more than one language? How are the concepts of language and multilingualism defined? Who is embraced by these definitions? Who is excluded? In what ways do individuals, schools, and government policies support and hinder the development of multilingual individuals and communities? Course texts will include literary and scholarly work from writers and thinkers including Sherman Alexie, Lisa Delpit, Ofelia Garcia, Django Paris, Amy Tan, and others. Through individual tutorials and revision of multiple drafts of writing assignments, students will prepare for a second semester writing seminar and build a foundation for further developing their written work throughout their undergraduate studies and beyond. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second semester writing seminar. 

WRPR 118A001 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, aesthetic, and bioethical views of embodiment, disability, and difference? How do portraits of disability engage differences of gender, race, and class? Our seminar will host a visiting artist who will guide us through a digital self-portraiture project. 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. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies and the minor in Visual Studies.]

WRPR 122A001  Writing in Public Health
J. Owen
MW 12:45-2:15

This class, subtitled “Pinpricks of Prevention”, will address the history, science and ethics of vaccination. The body’s ability to respond more vigorously to microbial infection on repeated exposure was first documented by Thucydides in 431 BCE, and early attempts to induce resistance to particular microbes by deliberately exposing subjects to infectious organisms are recorded as early as the 11th and 12th century CE. Notwithstanding its long history, and the dramatic reductions in death and morbidity from infectious disease that have resulted from childhood immunization, the practice of vaccination remains a controversial topic. Students will read selections from “The Vaccine Race” by Meredith Waldman; “Polio” by David Oshinsky; “The Great Influenza” by John Barry and “Deadly Choices” by Paul Offit. They will learn sufficient immunology during this course to understand the scientific basis of immunization and the current developments in vaccination science. During the semester, students will explore the ways in which vaccination regimens are developed and will evaluate the validity of concerns regarding the potential risks of vaccination. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 150A001 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 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? And is memory only ever singular and individual or can it be 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 technic 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 essay, 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. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150A003 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Shadow Voices: Figures of Slave Difference and Resistance in the Text
R. Rajbanshi
TTH 11:30-1:00

The narrativization of slavery has often relied on an imaginary of difference and a disguise of resistance. Slaves in ancient Greece, for example, might be described as barbarians and in medieval India as kinless, and texts from both sites flash up subversive slave tactics. Spanning several period and place specific histories of bondage, this course examines the ways in which the figure of the critically differenced slave haunts texts seemingly presenting free societies and temporalities. How do such voices offer a counter-narrative to the surface narrative? What subtle and overt means did the enslaved use to defy their circumstances? How did the logic for enslavement overlap with ontoepistemologies of difference that were reproduced? Our course inquiries help clarify the ways in which the slave figure was not only crucial to delineating the narrative trajectory of free subjects but continues to shadow, post formal abolition, emergent narratives of inequity and resistance. Supplemented by select essays and writing exercises, we begin our readings with the adaptation Bacchides of a Greek New Comedy play and Shakespeare’s The Tempest; we move to R.E. Conrad’s documentary compilation on chattel slavery in Brazil and Mary Shelley’s science fiction classic Frankenstein; and we close with Amitav Ghosh’s cross-temporal, cross-genre work In an Antique Land. Course work focuses not only on close reading and writing exercises but traces genre effects in plotting such voices. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150A002 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Crossing Borders
S. Watson
TTH 10:00-11:30

How do borders structure relationships between individuals, groups, and nations? In this course, we will explore geographic, linguistic, social, and racial border crossing. Beginning with Homer’s The Odyssey and ending with Refugee Tales (2016), we will examine the boundary between home and the foreign and consider the problems and opportunities that arise when people cross national and cultural borders. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, we will study cross-dressing and gender performance, analyzing how characters negotiate the border between prescribed male and female behaviors and desires. Reading Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), we will examine the construction of racial boundaries and consider what happens when individuals cross these borders. Finally, turning to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), we will consider the borders between the living and the dead and the natural and the supernatural. Throughout the course we will also consider questions of translation and communication: What happens when a text is translated from one language into another or from verse into prose? How does an author communicate the experiences of a character to an audience? [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150B001  Approaches to Literary Analysis: Deception, Recognition and Return
L. McGrane
TTH 10:00-11:30

How does one distinguish truth from lies, pretense from authenticity? In this course, we will read texts that depict literal and symbolic journeys to strange, unrecognizable, lands. From Homers epic, The Odyssey, to Martin Amis novel, Times Arrow, characters struggle with experiences of loss and death, misidentification, temporal distortion, and tentative rediscovery. As we read a variety of works, including tales of deception from Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Christina Rossetti, and Melville, we will explore narrative complexities across genres: what literary devices do authors employ to deceive, persuade, and frustrate the reader? And how can students, as writers, co-opt these techniques for their own uses? In intensive small-group tutorials and class discussions, students will hone analytical and writing skills, while navigating the shadowy spaces between fiction and history. [Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 150B002  Approaches to Literary Analysis:  Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination
C. Zwarg
TTH 11:30-1:00

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. [Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 155B001 Origin Stories: Initiations, Identities, and Indigenous Imaginations
T. Tensuan
TTH 11:30-1:00

In this course we will read a range of origin stories -- creation narratives, memoirs, alter/native accounts of settler colonialism, and trickster tales -- that delineate constructions of  identity and constitutions of community with a focus on the ways in which writers and artists represent ongoing “encounters” between indigenous and imperial cultures.  We will begin with a series of origin stories ranging from Eduardo Galeano’s compilation of  South and North American creation narratives to Hope Nicholson’s collection of contemporary cartoonists’ takes on trickster tales that delineate the ways in which individuals and communities contend with transformative change.  We will then move to a pair of memoirs – M. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain and Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave  that delineate the interrelation between personal, familial, communal, and colonial histories.  We will finish the semester with Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love – both formally inventive work that play with genres ranging from the lyric to the epic to speculative fiction as a means of offering new ways of understanding history and imagining the future. Our discussions will be organized around a set of interrelated questions: what values, concerns, and cultural points of orientation are established in and through origin stories? What role do cultural productions play in framing cultural ideologies and creating sites for reflection, contestation, and/or change?  What is at stake in acts of reading, interpretation, analysis, and critical confrontation? How do we understand our own critical and material situation in these histories; what roles or responsibilities do we have as critical and creative agents?

WRPR 156A001 Good Guys and Gals? Quaker Imagery in Fiction
E. Lapsansky
TTH 1:00-2:30

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-writerswith 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!) dont 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 fictionboth 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 worldfiction 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.

WRPR 164B001 Materiality and Spectacle in the 19th c. United States
T. Snyder
TTH 10:00-11:30
Spectacles move us past the ordinary, connecting us to the real, to the imaginary and to the possible. In the nineteenth century, these large-scale ephemeral events were experienced in fleeting ways, and yet they captured, reflected, influenced, impacted, and changed cultural experiences, meaning, and understanding. Did these spectacles, as Debord notes a century later, appear “at once as society itself, as part of society, and as a means of unification?” Did they also, as he continues, move us “from all that was once lived to mere representation?” Through a critical examination and close reading of historical and anthropological texts, both primary and scholarly, students will develop their own arguments related to the importance, and potential continued influence, of these events. Guided by the iterative process of scholarly inquiry, students will present their arguments and ideas in a series of weekly writing assignments, brief essays, and oral presentations. The course will also incorporate individual and collaborative assignments, class discussions, and regular conferences. [Counts towards the minor in Visual Studies.]

WRPR 167B001 Globalization and Culture in the 21st Century
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 define and explore global interconnectedness from multiple disciplinary perspectives - political, economic, etc. - but will focus primarily on various complex social and cultural dimensions of globalization including local/global tensions, Westernization, cultural borrowing, cultural imperialism, cultural exploitation, tourism, and pop culture (music, movies, etc.), as analyzed in ethnographies set in various locations around the world. Most of these locations will be outside the US, and we will include a particular case study of Japan. We will consider questions like: Is there a global village? How does the nation-state matter both more and less in a globalized world? How does globalization impact existing socioeconomic inequalities? Who benefits from increasing global interdependence and who does not, and why? This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester writing seminar.

WRPR 178A001  Beasts, Monsters and Giants:  Confronting Monsters from the Past
H. Silverblank
TTH 10:00-11:30

This seminar looks at the figure of the monster in different literary and artistic traditions, from ancient Greek literature to Gothic fiction and horror cinema. We will consider the shifting role of the monster, sometimes a source of horror, of reverence, of disgust, of humor, and sometimes even a source of endearment. We will ask: How do monsters function differently when they appear in different genres and different environments? How do monsters engage with questions surrounding the processes of artistic and creative production? What is the relationship between ancient myths of monstrosity and modern ones? To answer these questions we will survey a wide range of sources, including selections from Homer's Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Horace's Ars Poetica, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Postmodern Prometheus, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tod Browning’s Freaks, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. [Counts towards the major in Classical Culture and Society.]

WRPR 182A001  The American Family in Historical Perspective
E. Lapsansky
TTH 10:00-11:30

"The American family in historical perspective" will invite us to take look at a variety of family structures, behaviors, values, and stresses, as times, peoples, regions, and issues interface with our notions and realities of “family.” Including [but not limited to] Native American, Mexican, African American; Protestant, Jewish, Mormon and Catholic, North, South and West, over time, we will explore not only demographics, comparative rituals of birth, marriage, illness, disability; expectations of family/community "loyalty" vs. "individuation." While pursuing such critical concerns as immigration, migration, labor, and economy, we will also look at such topics as recreation and dietary norms, family-crisis management; "privilege" and lack thereof; and notions of education [e.g., who should get it,  what kind, and to what end?]. 

WRPR 186A  Reinventing Quakerism:  Rufus Jones, Henry Cadbury and the Rise of Quaker Liberalism
D. Watt
TTH 1:00-2:30

Quakerism isn’t stable.  It varies from generation to generation. The form of Quakerism that is mostly closely associated with Haverford College today is, for example, quite distinct from the sort of Quakerism that was connected to the college in 1970s.   That variety was Quakerism was, in turn, quite distinct from the one that was connected to Haverford a century earlier.  There is a real sense in which Quakerism was reinvented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students in the course will examine some of the changes that Quakerism underwent between the 1870s and the 1970s by examining the writings of two Haverfordians: Rufus Jones (1863-1948) and Henry Cadbury (1883-1974). Both men tried to reconcile Quaker traditions with modern life and thought, but they did so in different ways.  They reached markedly different conclusions about what Quakerism had been in the past and about what it should be in the future. (May count towards the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights.)

WRPR 188A01, 02 Epidemics and Society
E. Anders
TTH 10:00-11:30; 2:30-4:00

Epidemic diseases are often imagined as microscopic germs unleashing devastation as they traverse the globe. But epidemics are not merely biological phenomena; they are shaped by society, culture, and popular representation. As historian Charles Rosenberg has argued, epidemics often take on “the quality of pageant—mobilizing communities to act out propitiatory rituals that incorporate and reaffirm fundamental social values and modes of understanding.” How do individuals and the media construct narratives to make sense of epidemic outbreaks? How do cultural assumptions, political ideologies, and popular representations influence medical, social, and governmental responses to epidemics? This writing course examines cultural responses to epidemics, considering how ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, and national identity inflect responses to disease outbreaks; the social and cultural implications of outbreak narratives; and the ways in which responses to epidemic disease both reflect and constitute the boundaries of political communities. Guided by these questions, students will develop their skills in close reading, clear writing, and crafting effective arguments. Readings will emphasize historical primary sources, and may include newspaper and other popular accounts, medical articles, and documentary films.  [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.}

WRPR 189B01, 02  Health and the City
E. Anders
TTH 10:00-11:30; 2:30-4:00

This course examines the modern history of cities as sites of public health concern and intervention. Since the early nineteenth century, European and American cities have faced health challenges exacerbated by the epidemiological, ecological, and social consequences of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and social dislocation. City dwellers have been threatened by factors ranging from epidemic disease and poor sanitation to overcrowded slum housing and the prevalence of pests, problems that were complicated by social, political, and economic factors such as pervasive poverty, racial segregation, distrust of immigrant populations, and limited government resources. Students will be asked to think historically about a set of core questions and themes: how certain urban problems have attracted attention from health officials while others remain obscured or are seen as matters of private responsibility, how particular urban spaces come to be conceptualized as sites of medical concern while others remain invisible or neglected, how local social, political, and economic forces influence and shape public health interventions, and what it means to practice “public health” as a distinct domain of action, expertise, and authority. Guided by these questions, students will develop skills in close reading, clear writing, and crafting effective arguments. Readings will emphasize historical primary sources such as medical texts, public health reports and pamphlets, newspaper accounts, educational films, and legal documents. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 191B001 Constructions of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World
H. Silverblank
MW 2:15-3:45

This course explores the many ways Greeks and Romans thought about race and ethnicity and considers how that thinking remains influential today. By studying ancient literary texts and artistic works, we will examine how categories of race and ethnicity are constructed and presented in Greece and Rome. Our case studies will draw from a wide range of ancient texts, including the works of Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Aristotle, Vergil, Caesar, Tacitus and Plutarch. Key topics will include attempts to deal with “otherness”; ideas about racial origins; theories concerning human difference; notions of ethnic superiority; and the role of geography, biology, genetics, language, religion and culture in ethnic differentiation. We will consider how the Greeks and Romans viewed the many people they encountered, including those of Africa, Gaul, German, Britain, Persia, and Judea. Although many of our sources present a decidedly Greek or Roman perspective of other people, we will try to understand the perspectives of “the other” wherever possible. We will complement our readings of primary sources with modern scholarship on critical race theory to make distinctions between ancient models of race and ethnicity and modern ones, as well as identify their points of continuity and convergence. In that way, we can better understand how the Greeks and Romans recognized the varieties of humanity in the world as they knew and it and consider how these perceptions still resonate today. [Counts towards the major in Classical Culture and Society.]

WRPR 193B001 Slavery in Ancient Greece and Rome
M. Evans
TTH 10:00-11:30

According to the ancient historian M. I. Finley, there have been only five genuine slave societies, and two of them were ancient: those of classical Greece and Rome (the other three are the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil). Slavery was deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life in both societies, since it functioned as the key principle of social organization and the dominant mode of production. This course will explore slavery as a social, political, legal, economic and cultural institution in both the Greek and Roman worlds. In order to consider the impact of slavery on state and society in ancient Greece and Rome we will reflect on a number of topics, including the origins of slavery; the sources, number, legal status and treatment of slaves; ancient attitudes towards slaves and slavery; the family life of slaves; the many forms of slave labor; slave revolts and resistance; representations of slaves in literature and art; the archaeology of slavery; and manumission and freedom. We will also consider slavery in the American south to help us situate ancient slavery in a broader historical context. The class is partly lecture-based, but will be conducted largely in the manner of a seminar, with plenty of room for discussion. [Counts towards the major in Classical Culture and Society.]

WRPR 195B001 Multilingualism and Multilingual Identity
S. Bien-Gund
TTH 2:30-4:00
This course is designed to prepare first year students to read as writers, write as readers, and hone analytical and argumentative capacity. We will do this by investigating multilingualism in diverse communities and contexts, primarily within the United States and with an initial case study based in Morocco. Over the course of the semester, we will engage with questions such as: What does it mean to know more than one language? How are the concepts of language and multilingualism defined? Who is embraced by these definitions? Who is excluded? In what ways do individuals, schools, and government policies support and hinder the development of multilingual individuals and communities? Course texts will include literary and scholarly work from writers and thinkers including Sherman Alexie, Lisa Delpit, Ofelia Garcia, Django Paris, Amy Tan, and others. Through individual tutorials and revision of multiple drafts of writing assignments, students will prepare for a second semester writing seminar and build a foundation for further developing their written work throughout their undergraduate studies and beyond. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second semester writing seminar. 

WRPR 196A 01, 02 Latin American Landscapes in Literature, Visual Art, and Film
B. Leraul
TTH 10:00-11:30, TTH 1:00-2:30
The purported discovery of the Americas and ensuing encounter between Indigenous and Western cultures is a watershed moment in world history. It midwifed the birth of colonialism, capitalism, and the modern era. It also marks a revolution in the Western concept and representation of the world. Since then, the manipulation, construction, and conception of natural and built environments has been key to the self-understanding of the hybrid societies that have taken root here. This writing seminar introduces you to Latin American arts through a typology of spatial forms central to the continent’s culture and identity. From flights of the imagination when faced with the unknown (de la Vaca, colonial maps) to the imposition of “order” through graphic representations (Rama); from the enduring link between land and identity (P. Guzmán, A. Mendieta, Zurita) and the moralized distinction between city and the country (Donoso, C. Llosa, Rulfo) to the burgeoning metropolises of the twentieth century (Aira, C. Llosa, Mendonça Filho); from borders unable to stem the flows of migration (A. Caetano, Alÿs, Kuitca) to the non-places of virtual reality and utopian futurity, this course will challenge you to look behind the physical surface of the given. We will come to realize, along with Puerto Rican author Eduardo Lalo, that “Where is a ‘space’. . . constructed through the activity of culture and mankind’s unconscious . . . It can be anywhere, in any other where.” [Counts towards the concentration in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Studies.]

WRPR 197A 01, 02: Sound Counsel: Narrative, Advice, and the History of Self-Help
R. Young
TTH 10:00-11:30, 2:30-4:00
How do we define “good advice”? When do we need it? And whom do we turn to when we need counsel? To begin answering these questions, this course will begin with Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay “The Storyteller.” Here, Benjamin argues that modernity has killed the archetypal bard steeped in oral traditions, “a man who has counsel for his readers.” The novel, Benjamin argues, is a storytelling genre for an age without wisdom: the novelist is just a “solitary individual” who is “himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.” In this course, we will test this hypothesis by reading modern secular genres that, by Benjamin’s logic, can never offer counsel, and yet clearly seek to do so: the novel, the open letter, the short story, the non-fiction essay, the magazine advice column, the self-help manual, the pop song, and the podcast. Along the way, we will consider not only whether Benjamin’s claim about counsel in modernity checks out, but examine the broader nature of giving and receiving advice and the relationship between the art of persuasion, rhetoric, and the essay.

WRPR 198B 01, 02 Arts of Extraction: Latin American Representations of Environmental Injustice
B. Leraul
TTH 10:00-11:30, TTH 1:00-2:30
In recent years, the economic rise of China has greatly increased the price of raw materials, sparking a worldwide scramble to extract them at whatever cost to workers and the environment. In Latinl America, beginning in the late nineties, so-called neo-extractivism fueled generous social spending under leftist governments. Now, as the region’s political pendulum swings back to the right, we can see how neo0extractivism has, in fact, only sered to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few while immiserating the majority and destroying ecosystems. This toxic state of affairs is not new. In fact, the social and environmental history of Latin America since colonization—and particularly since twentieth-century modernization—is written in the boom and bust cycles of resource extraction. But, we are often told, history is written by the winners. This course maintains, then, that works of art are among the best windows onto the underside of Latin American modernity, its social and environmental injustices. We will read this history in texts—literary, filmic, and photographic—through a topology of the region’s primary export commodities: gold, silver, and nitrate dug from Colombian, Bolivian, and Chilean mines, which have leveled mountaintops and poisoned water sources; sugarcane harvested by enslaved and impoverished people working Cuban and Brazilian plantations; coffee, rubber, and bananas that have degraded tropical forests in Guatemala, Colombia, and Honduras; the oil and gas wells that dot the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean land and seascapes; and the cattle that have terraformed the vast plains of Argentina and Brazil making way, in recent decades, for GMO soybean monoculture that has mutated the genetic codes of plants, animals, and people exposed to the pesticides used in its cultivation. We will explore the possibilities and limitations of the arts for representing and reflecting on the interrelation of capitalist exploitation and environmental collapse. We will also explore the role of the arts in publicizing indigenous ways of being and thinking that, having survived centuries of genocide, motivate anticapitalist environmental movements across Latin America today. [Counts towards the concentration in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies.]

WRPR 199B 01, 02 Childhood and Children’s Literature
R. Young
TTH 10:00-11:30, 2:30-4:00
In this course, we will focus on how British culture constructed childhood in the nineteenth century. We will trace how the books, games, and toys of the period portrayed childhood as just a prelude to a professional future. In doing so, these materials not only changed the cultural understanding of childhood, but also characterized modern professionalism itself, with its continual stages of advancement and growth, as an extension of youth. We will examine how this discourse assumes that the child is white, British, male, and middle-class, and study moments when children who do not fit this descriptor challenge this normative profile. We will begin by reading early entries in the children’s literature canon such as The History of Little Goody-Two Shoes, Thomas Day’s The History of Sanford and Merton, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, and look at how these narratives, alongside board games and toys like The Game of Human Life, placed the child at the center of professional society. Then, we will consider how this ideology spoke to girls, who were largely excluded from having professional futures of their own, by conditioning them to expect marriages to professional men. We will read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and look at the plethora of fortune-telling toys that focused on “predicting” girls’ future husbands. Lastly, we will examine how, by the end of the century, children’s literature, games, and toys cast the British Empire as the new frontier for professional conquest, representing the people living in the Caribbean, India, the Middle East, and South America as merely challenges to be conquered in the future careers of British boys. [Counts towards the concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies.]