Category: Archive courses

Introduces students to Asian American communities through examination of music and issues related to music, including migration, memory, gender, the body, tradition, and generation. Explores how Asian Americans have expressed their experiences and asserted their senses of identity through music, thereby making sense of and claiming Americanness.

This will be a seminar on the movement often described as “American Experimentalism”. The course will begin with an examination of the “ground soil” for the Experimentalist movement – Emerson, Thoreau, William James, John Dewey – before moving into the writings of Charles Ives and Harry Partch. Analysis of works by these composers as well as works by such composers as Conlon Nancarrow and James Tenney will follow. Finally, we consider the meaning of the term “Experimentalism”, whether it is an apt description of aesthetic practice and its social, political and philosophical significance in relation to other Avant-garde movements.

Seminar on Swedish dramatist, novelist, scientist, and painter August Strindberg (1849-1912), on of Europe’ s most influential artists, and on of the most important innovators of modern drama.

The course is devoted to the films of Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most influential movie directors of the 20th century. The films will include Battleship Potemkin, October, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. The course will focus on his film-making experience in Moscow and Hollywood and will also feature his autobiographical and scholarly writings.

This course considers the full spectrum of reproduction – from babies to artworks – in modern and postmodern Norwegian cultural production, read in conversation with feminist scholarship and queer theory. We begin with a comparative study of contemporary birthing cultures and representations (including reality television) in Norway and the US. We then jump back to the nineteenth century, exploring the history of welfare and midwife-centered care in Norway, and work our way to the twenty-first century through depictions of pregnancy, birth, babies, and motherhood in the dramas of Henrik Ibsen, novels by Sigrid Undset and Cora Sandel, the poetry of Gro Dahle, and Margret Olin’s film, The Angel (2009). Ibsen and Sandel also serve as a means of exploring the reproductive metaphor – wherein the artist or writer is conceived as the parent of the artwork – and tensions between biological and aesthetic production. To be taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Olivia Gunn.

Drama and theatre in Russia from the late 17th through the 20th centuries: the first Russian play, adaptations to Russian tastes, vaudeville, the rise of Realism, challenges of Symbolism and Modernism, cabaret, Stanislavsky’s “System,” the sclerosis of Socialist Realism, and underground alternatives to it. Also considers the nature of mimesis and illusion, acting and representation.
Recommended preparation
Slavic department graduate students must read all texts in Russian; English translations are available for students from other disciplines.
Class assignments and grading
One play and critical materials to be covered per class meeting.
Students must contribute to discussion, produce a research paper of appropriate length at the conclusion of class.

This course approaches major questions about literature, performance, and temporality by exploring the dramas of Henrik IBSEN while also thinking about our current theoretical interest in the FUTURE.
Ibsen (1828 to 1906) is sometimes called the ‘father of modern drama.’ He is an analytical playwright, more frequently associated with the ghosts of the past than with the future. At the same time, his late works take a profound interest in characters’ desires to survive, to ‘make good’ after experiences of profound loss, and to move on. Our BIG question is thus, What does Ibsen have to say about and to the future, including our own ‘post-feminist’ era?
Over the course of the quarter, we will work our way from the past to the future, which will be defined in three primary ways:
1. Ideologies of the future
What futurisms, or beliefs and philosophies about the future, are found in Ibsen’s plays and then reproduced in criticism? Can the plays be used to talk back to normative ideas about history/the archive, the unconscious, patriarchy, progress, reproduction, (pro)creativity, and survival?
2. Theories about the future
How have ideologies about the past and future been explored in recent literary and critical theory, particularly in the fields of performance, queer, and critical race studies?
3. Adaptations for the future
A BOOM in Ibsen productions and adaptations is now taking place in the US. According to IbsenStage, more than a third of US stagings of Ibsen have taken place since 2000. How has Ibsen been adapted for contemporary audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
Assignments will include
1. A presentation based on/contributing to a short paper (6-8 pages) on an adaptation of an Ibsen play.
Together, we will read Little Eyolf and a recent adaptation, Indian Arm (2016), by BC-based playwright Hiro Kanagawa. You will also take on a play and adaptation of your own choosing to write-up and present to the class. The range of possibilities is immense here, from stage productions to graphic novels to films to …
2. An annotated bibliography (4-10 works) on a relevant research subject of your choosing
Sources might be taken from Ibsen studies, from drama and performance criticism, from contemporary queer-feminist theory, from …
Guidance concerning adaptations and research foci will, of course, be provided!
 
 

Museum 563: Who Owns Humanity? Explores the legal and ethical questions surrounding the ownership of art, digital collections, ancient skeletons, biological data and DNA. How do changing views of history, education and science shape how ownership is defined in the 21st Century, and what ethical issues are raised for museums and libraries?
3 credits. Tues/Thur, 6 – 7:20 p.m. SLN 17376
Instructor: Adam Eisenberg (eisena@uw.edu).
Add code required. Please contact the instructor for add code.

SCAND 504, contemporary literary theory
ENG 599 special studies seminar
C LIT 535, Criticism And Ideology Critique II
In this course, queer theory is treated as a case study for analyzing the practice of critical theory, its manifestations in sub-fields, its ties to art and activism. Readings will be assigned in “clusters,” so that a queer text will be read together with key sources and/or responses that inspire and advance or critique that text’s central claims. Readings will be taken from the fields of literature and literary studies, philosophy, sociology, history, psychoanalysis, feminism, and gay and lesbian studies.
We will also pay attention to the national, cultural, and ethno-racial location of queer theory, contrasting its ‘local’ (US) and normative (white academic) identity with its impacts and differences in other places and from other perspectives. In the unit “Pride and shame in (queer?) Scandinavia,” for example, Scandinavia will be considered as a model for an alternative location for queer theory.