Courses

LAST 344/AFAM344
Professor Andrew Walker
MW 8:20-9:40
CAMS 1&2

In 1791, enslaved people rose up against their masters in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, at the time the most profitable plantation society in the world. Thirteen years later, their efforts would culminate in the declaration of independence of Haiti, a nation founded on the pillars of antislavery, anticolonialism, and racial equality. This course investigates the regional and global significance of this revolution through its interconnections with Haiti’s neighbors in the Caribbean and across Latin America. First, we will look at the immediate implications of Haiti’s founding for the fate of New World slavery during the Age of Revolutions. Next, we will consider Haiti’s long-term impact on national identities, racial formations, and future revolutionary struggles in the Americas over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Wednesday 1:20-3:20PM at World Music Hall
Wednesday  3:30—4:30PM sectional rehearsal with TA at WMH  

First class meeting & audition on September 5, class ends on December 1

Course Description:

This course, directed by Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Jin Hi Kim, is an experiential, hands-on percussion ensemble with the predominant instrument in Korean music, the two-headed janggo drum. Students will learn to play a range of percussion instruments including janggo, barrel drum (buk), hand gong (kwenggari), and suspending gong (jing). Through the janggo drumming students gain first hand experience with the role music plays in meditation and the benefits it offers to develop a calm, focused group experience. In the end they integrate their focused mind, physical body energy and breathing through a stream of repetitive rhythmic cycles.

They will be introduced to traditional folk and court styles as well as creative collaborations with a dancer(s) or musicians from other cultures, if there is an opportunity comes in during the semester. The ensemble plays pieces derived from tradition and new ideas and creates new work exploring imaginative sounds on those instruments. The ensemble will experience a deep respect for the diverse cultural backgrounds of the students developed from the efforts of teamwork and creating music together through Korean drumming. The semester will end with a live performance for the public.

For more information, please contact jkim14@wesleyan.edu.

Applications are now open for two exciting courses that provide a deep dive into the realm of social impact and social entrepreneurship work. Applications are open until 11:59 pm on April 13. Applicants will be notified by 9:00 am on April 18th.

The Patricelli Center Fellowship (CSPL264 and CSPL265) is a year-long, project-based learning opportunity for entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and changemakers. They are seeking highly-dedicated students who wish to take a deep dive into social impact work. Some students enroll with a specific venture in mind, while others designed a project or join a team after the course begins.

The Jewett Center Board Residency Program (CSPL280 and CSPL281) provides an opportunity for Wes students to learn about the nonprofit sector while serving as non-voting members of a local board of directors. In addition to a weekly lecture on campus, we got to attend board meetings, actively participate in board committees, and complete board-level projects.

ENGL 373: From Courtly Love to Cannibalism: Medieval Romances 
MW 2:50-4

Romance is the narrative form of medieval sexualities and courtly love, but it also gives literary shape to social worlds in which a queer protagonist loses gender, skin color changes with religion, and a dog might be the hero of a tale. We will begin with texts that date from the Romance’s origins in 12th-century France and continue with the form’s development up to the well-known Middle English texts of the 14th century, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight set at King Arthur’s court. Some of the topics we will consider are Romance’s engagement with the religious and ethnic conflicts of the Crusades, theories of good and bad government, and of course, Christian mysticism and the Holy Grail.

Readings:

Béroul, Romance of Tristan
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances
Marie de France, Lais
Aucassin and Nicolette
The Quest of the Holy Grail
Romance of Silence
Song of Roland
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Orfeo (Online)
The King of Tars (Online)
Richard Coer de Lyon (Online)

FIST232/MDST232  Obscure Enigma of Desire
Jeff Rider
MW 10:50AM-12:10PM; FISK210

This course is an introduction to the study of the ways we create meanings when we read texts. It will focus on several deliberately obscure literary texts from twelfth-century France and will examine them in the light of the classical and medieval concepts of enigma, the marvelous (wonderful), fabula, and allegory as well as some modern theoretical works about how we understand narratives. We will seek to understand why deliberate obscurity is an important part of literature and how medieval authors created narratives that seem particularly meaningful precisely because they are obscure. We will consider why we feel these texts have meaning and the ways in which we make them meaningful to us.

This course will be co-taught in parallel with a course (in English) on the same subject offered at the Charles University in Prague by Professor Lucie Dolezalova. About half of the classes will be conducted together with the class in Prague through teleconferencing and Professor Dolezalova will teach one week of the course at Wesleyan and meet with students while she is here.

Readings:

• Marie de France, Lais
• Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot) and The Story of the Grail
• The Quest for the Holy Grail
• Aristotle, Poetics (excerpts)
• Cicero, On the Orator and On Invention (excerpts)
• Rhetorica ad Herennium (excerpts)
• Quintillian, The Oratorical Education (excerpts)
• Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights (excerpts)
• Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, On the Trinity, Questions Concerning the Heptateuch, and Expositions of the Psalms (excerpts)
• Isidore of Seville, Etymologies (excerpts)
• Aldhelm of Malmesbury, Enigmas (excerpts)
• Abelard, Christian Theology (excerpts)
• William of Conches, Commentaries on Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” (excerpts)
• Hugh of Saint-Victor, On the Three Days, On Meditation, and Didascalicon (excerpts)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles  and Summa Theologica (excerpts)
• Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (excerpts)
• Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics”
• Joseph Dane, “Integumentum as Interpretation”
• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (excerpts)
• Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (excerpts)
• Louis Mink, “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension”
• Karl F. Morrison, “Hermeneutics and Enigma: Bernard of Clairvaux’s De consideratione”
• Paul Ricoeur, “Metaphor and Hermeneutics,” “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” “What is a Text?” and “Appropriation”
• Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (excerpts)
• Jan Ziolkowski, “Theories of Obscurity in the Latin Tradition”

Reason and its Limits
COL 292 / PHIL 291
MW 2:50-4:10

This course offers a close study of Immanuel Kant’s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, supplemented by related writings by Kant and some secondary literature. Kant observes that the history of philosophy is rife with disagreements, even though philosophers purport to traffic in necessary truths disclosed by reason alone. This scandalous fractiousness calls into question reason’s ability to offer substantive insights into necessary truths. Kant’s “critique” aims to vindicate reason by distinguishing, in a principled manner, the sorts of things we can know with certainty from those that lie beyond the limits of human understanding. His central thesis, “transcendental idealism,” holds that “reason has insight only into what it produces after its own plan” (Bxiii). In other words, we can indeed be certain of key structural features of reality such as its spatiotemporality and causal interconnectedness–but only because those features are, in some crucial sense, mind-dependent. This class will explore in detail the arguments for these claims as well as prominent interpretations of their philosophical upshot.

Modern Aesthetic Theory
COL 269/PHIL 269
MW  10:50AM-12:10PM

As a philosophical discipline, aesthetic theory initially coalesced around a cluster of related issues concerning the nature of beauty and the norms governing its production, appreciation, and authoritative assessment. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, both art and aesthetics undergo a conspicuous yet enigmatic shift, signaled by (among other things) Hegel’s declaration that “art, in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” Rather suddenly, classical accounts of beauty, genius, aesthetic experience, and critical taste are beset by anxieties about the autonomy and significance of aesthetic praxis in human life and, subsequently, by a series of challenges to the tenebility of traditional aesthetic categories–author, text, tradition, meaning and interpretation, disinterested pleasure, originality, etc. Our aim in this course is to track these conceptual shifts and to interrogate the rationale behind them. (This course complements, but does not presuppose COL 266: History and Limits of Aesthetic Theory.)

Hey! Hablas español hasta que te toca decir una palabra that you don’t know how to say in Spanish?  Do you wonder why some words in Spanish have accents and some don’t?  This is the class for you!

SPAN 203: Spanish for Heritage Speaker
Spring 2018; T-Th 1:30 – 2:45 pm

A course taught at Trinity College and offered to Wesleyan students by telepresence, with plenty of academic and technical support at the home campus, both during and outside of class.

This course is designed for heritage speakers–students who understand and speak Spanish, who grew up in a Spanish-speaking environment, but whose education was primarily in English, in the US. This course, offers many benefits, such as:

• Study Spanish in an academic setting in the same way that native English-speakers study English
• Polish both oral and written language skills in Spanish
• Learn more about your language and your cultural heritage
• Meet students with similar interests and experiences
• Gain awareness and understanding of the Hispanic/Latin@ cultures: i.e., identity and communities inside and outside the US, language variation, geography, history, customs and traditions, current events, music, arts and food
• Prepare for study abroad
• Increase internship and career opportunities
• Can count towards the HISP major

Interested? Please contact Profesora Pérez-Gironés: aperezgirone@wesleyan.edu  (127 Downey House; office hours: Monday 1:30-2:30, Wednesday 3-4, and by appointment.)

During spring semester, a small, project-based section of PSYC105 (Foundations of Contemporary Psychology) will be taught. This special section will provide an introduction to the field of psychology though digital projects that will include video production, editing, post-production and graphic design using Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. Interested students should request section 2.

Introduction to Experimental Music (MUSC 109)

Fall 2017; Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:50 p.m. – 4:10 p.m., RHH 003

This course is a survey of recent and historical electronic and instrumental experimental works, with emphasis on the works of American composers. Starting with early experimentalists, germinal works of John Cage and Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Morton Feldman will be studied; followed by electronic and minimal works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier Robert Ashley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell, John Zorn, Julius Eastman and including discussions of recent work by composers, performers, and sound artists such as Pamela Z, Tristan Perich, Jacob Cooper, Lesley Flanigan,  Nick Hallett, Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture), Jennifer Walshe, and Object Collection. The course includes lectures, demonstrations, and performances, occasionally by guest lecturers.

MUSC287 — Performing the Posthuman: Music and Auditory Culture in the Age of Animanities

Crosslisting: AMST 278, ENVS 287
Course Cluster: Animal Studies

This seminar engages questions of musical difference by addressing representations, tropes, and examples of posthuman performance, animal musicalities, music mimetic of nonhuman aurality, and cross-species and multi-species performance. Throughout the course we will think across varied types and categories of sounds to explore and contextualize familiar questions about how we sing, play, perform, stage, and sound musical identity, examining the intersections among the humanities, science and technology studies, and the sonic arts. “Animanities” is the name attributed by scholars to the musical response to the dilemma facing the humanities to value, take into account, and take seriously the aural and performance worlds of the nonhuman. It is necessary to include all human, more-than-human, sentient and non-sentient, machine, and animal sounding and musicking into the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and sound studies. By listening across different kinds of auditory culture and sounding, scholars can interrogate questions addressing how traditions of listening shape our habits of perceiving others: how we hear nonhuman animals, how we incorporate nonhuman sounding into music composed by humans, how technology has played a role in the study and development of nonhuman and human musicality, and what it means to listen to and value sonic difference more broadly. Through discussions of musical and cultural difference that enrich ongoing discussions of race, gender, and sexuality we will come to a stronger understanding of music’s role in imagined and experienced natural worlds. Topics and case studies will include the pedagogies of audio bird guides; new age nature recordings, multi-species “collaborative” performances; sampled and electronically rendered animal and nature performance in digital video games; wildlife field recording and documentary soundtracks/sound design; forms of animal and environmental mimesis used by composers; the jazz aviary of exotic songbirds and chirping canaries in the publications and reception history of the 1930s–1960s that document female jazz singers and virtuosic operatic sopranos; they way nonhuman animal behavior influenced experimental music communities; and how human musical language and terminology was used to describe the musicking of nonhuman animals in documents circulated by the National Audubon Society and other wildlife guides and field recording initiatives. This seminar draws on the classroom community’s interdisciplinary backgrounds and interests as well as readings and case studies that cross and challenge disciplinary boundaries. Students can achieve success in this course without previous musical knowledge.

Tony and Obie Award Winner, Greg Kotis (Urinetown) will be teaching the Music Theater Workshop, THEA 279. 

The course is described here:

https://iasext.wesleyan.edu/regprod/!wesmaps_page.html?stuid=&facid=NONE&crse=014313&term=1179

There are prerequisites, but, as ever, there are also prerequisite over-rides for students who have the appropriate skill set. 

Greg Kotis’s webpage lists this for info about him: 

Greg Kotis is the author of many plays and musicals including Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards, Yeast Nation (Book/Lyrics), The Unhappiness Plays, The Boring-est Poem in the World, The Truth About Santa, Pig Farm, Eat the Taste, Urinetown (Book/Lyrics, for which he won an Obie Award and two Tony® Awards), and Jobey and Katherine.  His work has been produced and developed in theaters across the country and around the world, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Conservatory Theater, American Theater Company, Henry Miller’s Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Stage and Film, Perseverance Theatre, Roundabout Theatre Company, Soho Rep, South Coast Rep, and The Old Globe, among others.  Greg is a member of the Neo-Futurists, the Cardiff Giant Theater Company, ASCAP, the Dramatists Guild, and is a 2010-11 Lark Play Development Center Playwrights Workshop Fellow.  He grew up in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Ayun Halliday, his daughter India, and his son Milo.

Anyone more interested in Kotis could check him out here: http://gregkotis.com/