Supplement Fall 2007—Added Courses
ARTS 191	ST: Book Arts	0.50 unit, E. Sheffield
What is the alchemy that transforms image/object/text into a work of art? This course is an introduction to the artistic practice of book arts, also called artists’ books. Book arts is sometimes confused with illustration, which is art that accompanies text and helps to tell a story, but in book arts, the book itself is the work of art. Through a progression of exercises, presentations and projects, the conceptional thinking and artistic skills that go into the planning and making of artists’ books is explored. Students will be required to purchase individual supplies. No prerequisites.
DANC 108	Beginning Modern Dance	0.25 unit, K. Radella Feller
This course's focus is on modern dance technique for the beginning-level student. During the semester, self expression through movement will be explored through exercises emphasizing the basic concepts of breath, mobilizing weight, and improvisation. The course involves intensive movement participation; however, there is no stress placed on public performance. No prior experience is necessary. No prerequisite.
DANC 109	Beginning Ballet	0.25 unit, J. Brodie
The ballet style and movement vocabulary are presented in this technique course for the beginning-level student. During the semester, students will be introduced to the fundamental components of ballet technique, including line, position, and artistry, with a focus on correct body mechanics. The course involves intensive movement participation; however, there is no stress placed on public performance. No prior experience is necessary. No prerequisite.
DANC 291	ST: The Theory and Art of Teaching Dance	0.50 unit, J. Brodie
In this course, students will explore theoretical as well as practical aspects of teaching the art of dance in various contexts. Readings and discussions will consider methods for integrating somatic techniques and scientific principles into the dance technique class, in addition to contemporary aesthetic practices. Different learning and teaching environments will be compared and contrasted, including the private sector, public schools, and higher education. Adaptations necessitated by dance style, age, motivation, and skill level will be addressed both theoretically and experientially, as students will be required to plan, teach, and evaluate their own and each other's pedagogical choices in practice teaching sessions. Requires permission of the instructor.
DRAM 222	The Actor	0.50 unit, D. Kramer
Through the rehearsal and performance of various scenes, students will explore the nature of the actor’s contribution to the theater. Work will include performance exercises, readings, and written assignments. Prerequisite: DRAM 111Y-112Y.
DRAM 391	ST: Ensemble Creation and Performance	0.50 unit, M. Rice
Ensemble-generated theater is a powerful and steadily growing genre. Because it does not bind its performers to an external text and traditional rehearsal process, but rather develops in-process from material generated by diverse individuals, it attempts to create an intimate dialogue with its audience through exploration of personal experience using organic movement, ensemble-inspired text, and, often, alternative media. After building a working vocabulary through study of successful collaboration techniques, contemporary ensemble performance, movement and improvisational methods, this class will work together with the instructor to use its unique theatrical strengths and personal stories to create a work for performance on Kenyon’s main stage. Readings and screenings will include the work of The Wooster Group, Ann Bogart and Chuck Mee, Caryl Churchill, Pig Iron Theater, and Moises Kauffman. Preference given to juniors and seniors. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
ENGL 103.05	Film & Literature: Secrets of Form	.50 unit, P. Vigderman
“It isn’t what she said but how she said it...” We are used to letting literature and film entangle us in their stories and their ideas, but how do they work their magic? In this course we’ll look at various ways the two arts create narrative pleasure and lyric intensity, with an emphasis on the different formal strategies that make up their enchantment. We’ll read fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama with an eye to understanding why Joyce or Thoreau or Shakespeare or Sophocles, Keats or Dickinson or Whitman stay always fresh, and at some writers of our own time who may do so too. Half the course will focus on the strategies that have been developed in cinema—how we understand the language of shot length, lighting, close-ups, or musical subtext--and the way Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin or Errol Morris give us new eyes with which to see our world. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair.
ENGL 103.06	Post Colonial Literature	0.50 unit, K. Fernando
Description to follow…
ENGL 103.07	Metapoetics and Metafictions	0.50 unit, T. Hawks
You are reading the course description for a class on metapoetics and metafiction, writing that self-consciously draws attention to its own status as writing. You may be holding a course catalogue in your hands, or perhaps gazing into a monitor, as I am now. What does it mean when a piece of writing, like this course description, addresses you directly as its reader? How do we respond when a book tells us it is a book, rather than pretending it’s an experience we’re having or a voice that is speaking to us? This class will examine works from various periods that explicitly acknowledge—indeed, even celebrate-- their own textuality. Some texts achieve this self-consciousness through framing devices, some through attempts to incorporate the reader or author within their narratives, and some by drawing attention to the material conditions of textual transmission, conditions we conventionally ignore. Do such self-reflexive texts as a Borges story or Wes Craven’s Scream suggest language’s inability to describe the actual world, or—conversely—do they seek to extend their scripts beyond the text, suggesting that our extraliterary experiences are themselves enmeshed in larger discourses? Why are these recursive moments of self-reference so often accompanied by images of violence and death? When writers appear as characters or signatures in their own writing, have they achieved immortality or merely a premature burial? Are their inscriptions monuments or epitaphs? In order to answer these questions, we will read fiction by Borges, Calvino, Gilman and Unamuno, read poems by Agha Shahid Ali, Anne Carson, Mark Strand and Walt Whitman and view films by Wes Craven, Mark Forester and Charlie Kauffman, as well as examining episodes of framing, signature and self-reference in Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Mirza Ghalib.
ENGL 232	Renaissance Poetry	0.50 unit, E. Boeckeler
This study of the Renaissance poem opens up a delicate world of intensely structured language. We will develop strategies of micro- and macro-reading for understanding how sparks of meaning lattice across a poem to create a whole effect: we will see how a single letter can change everything, how much a single word can do, a single line, a stanza within a poem, an entire sonnet within a series of sonnets. We will explore ways poems draw us into their worlds by transforming us into the “I” of the lyric speaker, by articulating our own emotions in a beautiful and intricate arrangement of words designed to amplify or soothe. In the light of early modern poetic studies as well as contemporary methodologies (e.g., George Puttenham, Roman Jakobson), this course examines the major Renaissance poetic movements and poetics of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including the works of sonneteers, popular ballad writers, the Cavalier Poets, the Metaphysical Poets, and others. Enrollment limited for sophomores; permission of the instructor required for first-year students. NOTE: This class is listed in the second-semester of the 2007-08 Course of Study
ENGL 260	Modernism	0.50 unit, J. Matz
This class is incorrectly listed in the Course of Study as ENGL 360.
ENGL 291	ST: Imagined Nations: Postcolonial Approaches to the Novel	0.50 unit, I. Garcia
From /Heart of Darkness/ to /Midnight's Children/ to /Wide Sargasso Sea/ to /Pushing the Bear/, this class seeks to identify the outer reaches and limitations of postcolonial theory through its application to the analysis of novels that have come to define and/or challenge national identities in Africa, India, the Caribbean and the United States.
ENGL 291.02	ST: American Poetry after Modernism	0.50 unit, T. Hawks
Poets writing in the second half of the 20th century were after modernism in more ways than one. In addition to merely coming after modernism, many mid-century poets were also “after” it, in pursuit of a modernism interpreted variously to signify cosmopolitanism and polyvocality, fragmentation and collage, or mythmaking and orientalism. At the same time, other mid-century poets defined themselves by rejecting precisely these characteristics of modernism, opting instead for the local, the unified and the pastoral in their poems. In this course, we will explore various schools and movements from the mid-twentieth century, including the New York School, the Confessionals, the Beats, the Black Mountain School and Deep Image poets. In reading poets representing these movements we will pay particular attention to how central themes of modernism, such as myth and history, urban landscapes, sexual deviance and sexual sterility, are taken up and reworked by mid-century poets.
ENGL 391.01	ST: The Lyric:Ekphrastic Poetry	0.50 unit, J. Clarvoe
From Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, to Keats’ great “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” to John Ashbery’s meditation on Parmigianino’s painting in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” poets have attempted to capture works of visual art in words. This course will consider examples from the ekphrastic tradition, from classical to contemporary poets, as well as a range of theories of ekphrasis. In part, this course will explore the various ways that such poems offer, as the root meaning of ekphrasis indicates, a “speaking out” or a “telling in full” of what is silent in a painting, sketch, or sculpture. The fascination with ekphrasis should also suggest, however, ways that visual art, at its best, evokes more than the merely visible, as great poetry evokes that which is beyond words.
ENGL 391.02	ST: Shakespeare’s Henriad	0.50 unit, P. Lentz
A close reading of Shakespeare’s famous tetralogy centering upon English history from the downfall of Richard the Second through the Battle of Agincourt: Richard II, Henry IV pt 1, Henry IV pt 2, and Henry V. The guiding critical principle will be Horatian: that great literature can "teach and delight." The guiding critical aspiration will be Arnoldian: "to see the object"– the tetralogy– "as in itself it really is." No prerequisites; enrollment unlimited.
ENGL 491.01	ST: Contemporary American Indian Poetry	0.50 unit, J. McAdams
How do indigenous writers bear witness to history? How are they influenced by concerns of community, audience, and tradition? These are some of the questions we will consider in this exploration of poetry by contemporary Native American writers. We will read works by the major poets of what has come to be known as the ‘Native American Renaissance’—Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), Carter Revard (Osage), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), and Joy Harjo (Muskogee)—as well as authors from the generation following—Allison Hedge Coke (Tsalagi/Huron), and Diane Glancy (Cherokee), who will be on campus during the spring 2008 semester as the Thomas Chair in Creative Writing. To accompany the written texts, we’ll attend readings by one (or more) of these authors. We’ll view taped interviews and Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancy Dancing, based on his poetry collection of the same name. Other secondary materials will include memoirs and essays written by the poets, as well as articles from the recent critical collection, Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
ENGL 491.02	ST: Alphabet in Renaissance Literature and Visual Arts	0.50 unit, E. Boeckeler
Think about the letters you’re reading right now.  How do we know ourselves and our world through the ABC’s? The development of the printing press in the fifteenth century ushered in a new sensibility to the powers of the alphabet, prompting a cultural investigation that asks what letters are, what they can do, and how they are related to our minds and bodies. This course examines the crucial contributions of alphabets to artistic production across a vast array of early modern materials, including Shakespearean drama, letter origin stories, children’s reading primers, alphabet philosophy tracts, typography, political alphabets, ABC ballads, figured alphabets, letters in painting and in architecture. We aim to cultivate a heightened sensitivity to the linguistic and visual structures of texts as well as images through the examination of their letters, as well as answer the basic questions about alphabets posed by the Renaissance. You’ll never look at letters the same way again! Enrollment limited. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
FREN 391	ST: The French Literary Renaissance	0.50 unit, N. Medevieille
Compared to the Italian Rinascita, the French Renaissance started late in history: it is often viewed as spanning the sixteenth century, from the advent of Francis the First (1515), to the end of the French wars of religion in 1598. We will look at the way French intellectuals tried to enrich their language, to make it a vernacular worthy of literature. The course will focus on the tradition of short narratives, and the advent of high poetry with the work of the Pléiade authors (such as Ronsard and du Bellay) as well as their direct precursors. We will also spend time on two “monuments” of French literature: Rabelais, whose literary enterprise enriched tremendously the vocabulary of the period, and who offers a perspective on medieval culture, and also on the intellectual debates of a period when Europe discovered “its many others”, either in the New Worlds, or in itself, with the advent of Protestantism; and Montaigne, who treats some of the same themes, and whose Essais close a century that could be very optimistic, with a more somber assessment of the European culture. Readings and discussions in French. Prerequisite: FREN 321 or 322 or permission of instructor.
HIST 105	American Presidents	0.50 unit, W. Scott
The seminar will look at the American presidency through the lives and administrations of select presidents, including Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. In addition to seminar participation and assigned readings, each student will undertake an independent research project on either the presidency or a particular president. Students will present their findings to the seminar as well as complete a research paper. (Fulfills portions of the history major foundation survey requirement.)
HIST 275	World War II	0.50 unit, S. Coulibaly
This course will examine the circumstances and factors leading to World War II and to U.S. entry into the war. The course will focus on the disruption of the world order through the rise of German, Japanese, and Italian imperialism. The course will analyze the effect of the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s. Other topics include the military strategies and conduct of the war, its impact on the home front, and its long-term effects on U.S. foreign policy.
HIST 311	Immigrant Experience in the US	0.50 unit, S. Coulibaly
We will examine how successive waves of immigrants, from the eve of the Civil War to the present, have shaped cities, markets, suburbs, and rural areas, while altering education, labor, politics, and foreign policy. The course will address such questions as: Why do people leave their homelands? Where do they settle in America and why? What kinds of economic activities do they engage in? How do the children adapt? How does assimilation work? What are the effects of immigration on those born in America?
HIST 391.01	ST: Language and National Identity in Asia	0.50 unit, L. Kim
The use of certain languages and the modification of its spoken and written forms have been political strategies for establishing and perpetuating ideals of nationalism in 20^th-century Asia.  Proponents of language policies argue that official languages, shared languages, and standardized languages are important elements for economic, social, and cultural unity.  Critics point out negative consequences such as the suppression or extermination of languages, along with corresponding social and cultural identities.  This course will examine aspects of language legislation in eight national cases.  Each case will present a topic of sociolinguistics such as script reform and incorporation of foreign vocabulary with a particular historical concept such as modernity and postcolonialism.  Students will be expected to prepare oral presentations and final papers on one of the cases introduced in the course or others based on consultation with the instructor.
HIST 391.02	ST: The Progressive Era, 1890-1920	0.50 unit, B. Jordan
The term “Progressive Era” has both helped and misled historians analyzing the nature of American society between 1890 and 1920.  Historians have characterized a wide array of responses to modernization as progressive.  Social, labor, and gender historians have complicated our understanding of the period by examining the motivations of various reformers and how their projects affected different social groups.  This class will grapple with the conflicting meanings of progressivism and changing historical accounts of this important era.  Our readings and discussions will scrutinize contentious efforts to reform government, gender and racial roles, childrearing, work, leisure, and natural resource conservation.
INST 131	China in Transition	0.50 unit, M. Mood
In this first-year seminar we will explore the exploding changes in China over the last twenty years. China provides an excellent introduction to the steamroller effects of globalization, since the country came equipped with a very strong, capable government whose leaders were committed to containing even the smallest noneconomic changes related to its market transition. As those leaders have discovered, however, there is no way to “let in the breeze without the mosquitoes”: the government has not been able to devise a “screen” to keep out influences that have profoundly changed China’s politics, economics, and society. Economic and cultural globalization has transformed every aspect of Chinese society today. Religious, political, environmental, and economic protests shake the country every month, and the number of protests is skyrocketing. Pornography, prostitution, and divorce are on the rise, disrupting social life. New wealth is accompanied by destabilizing inequalities. New development, which has given some Chinese a lifestyle rivaling that of European royalty, has produced only dislocation and devastation for others. From televisions and fax machines in the 1980s to the Internet in the new century, globalization has unequivocally ended China’s isolation. Our focus will be on the specific transitions as well as on the universality of globalization. Students will be expected to actively participate in each class and to help shape the focus of discussion. Primary research on the Internet will constitute a large part of the requirements. Open only to first-year students. Enrollment limited to fifteen.
JAPN 391	ST: Japanese Masterpieces in Translation	0.50 unit, M. Nagase
This course provides a broad overview of the representative literary genres and masterpieces produced in Japan during the classical, medieval, early-modern, modern and contemporary periods. While reading selected works, we will discuss the historical and socio-cultural backgrounds in which the works were created. The goal of this class is to cultivate a familiarity and appreciation of the diverse cultures and societies within Japan that spawned these genres and literary works. Our readings will cover representative Japanese literary genres such as poetry, tales, diaries, autobiographical writings, drama, novels, comics and animations. No prerequisite.
PSYC 391	ST: Health Psychology	0.50 unit, A. White
Health Psychology is designed provide a broad overview of theory, research and practice of the psychological factors related to welness, health, and illness, with an emphasis on the prevention and modification of health compromising behaviors. We will use the biopsychosocial to approach such topics as: promotion of good health and prevention of illness, the recovery, rehabilitation, and psychosocial adjustment that correspond with health problems, and the role of stress and coping in illness.
Cancelled Courses—Fall 2007
HIST 189	Foundation Seminar: African-American Hist in Film and Fiction	G. McNair
JAPN 325	Intro to Japanese Linguistics	H. Tomita
PSCI 491.01	ST: State, Failure, Success, Order	D. Rowe
SOCY 477Y-478Y	Fieldwork:Rural Life	H. Sacks