Mar 29, 2024  
2016-2017 
    
2016-2017 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Course Descriptions


 
  
  • ENG 397 - Independent Study


    Instructor
    Staff

    Independent study under the direction of a faculty member who approves the topic and determines the means of evaluation.

    Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Permission of the instructor required.

  
  • ENG 400 - Seminars


    Instructor
    Staff

    Seminars, numbered 400 through 494, are limited to twelve juniors and seniors with preference to English majors.  Topics vary by section and year and are posted on the English Department website.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    The following topics count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major:

    ENG 454 Cleopatra

    ENG 465 Contemporary American Feminism & Theatre

    ENG 472 Virginial Woolf

    ENG 472 Fallen Women

    ENG 472 Gossip

    ENG 488 Modernism, Space, Place, Gender

    ENG 488 Modern Poetry: Queer America

     

  
  • ENG 401 - Seminar: Reported Creative Nonfiction


    Instructor
    Lewis

    This creative writing seminar combines the essential elements of creative nonfiction with the fruits of academic research and reportage – in both the library and the field (as through intervieiwing).  Students will define appropriate projects almost immediately and set about researching them under the guidance of the instructor and other professionals.  The research will culminate in a piece of reported creative nonfiction, prepared for publication, ranging from 6000 to 7000 words.  Weekly meetings will be devoted to discussing a wide array of reading in the genre, presenting research to the class, and revisiting drafts in a workshop setting.  Readings will include works by such writers as John McPhee, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, Thomas Mallon, Atul Gawande, Francine Prose, and many others.  Ideally, students who enroll will have taken a creative writing course at the 200 level or higher.

  
  • ENG 402 - Seminar


    Instructor
    Staff

    Seminars, numbered 400 through 494, are limited to twelve juniors and seniors with preference to English majors.  Topics vary by section and year and are posted on the English Department website.

  
  • ENG 403 - Seminar


    Instructor
    Staff

    Seminars, numbered 400 through 494, are limited to twelve juniors and seniors with preference to English majors.  Topics vary by section and year and are posted on the English Department website.

  
  • ENG 404 - Seminar: Writing the “Sexy”* Novella


    Instructor
    Flanagan

    This course offers students in any major at Davidson College an opportunity to realize their dream of writing the first strong draft of a novella that has the potential to be developed into a novel.  Before the writing begins, students will read and dissect two novellas, each selected from a list of prize-winning books.  These selections are intended to inspire the student-writer’s creativity.  By the fourth week, writing begins in earnest with short exercises produced in and out of class.  By the end of the term, each writer would have produced at least 60 pages of a compelling story.  Writers should be prepared to write often, discuss their work in the seminar, and be open to critiques that are intended to help them create “sexy” fiction.

    *”Sexy” means provocative, intriguing, inspiring, and/or compelling. It does not refer to pornographic butit can encompass the erotic.

    This course satisfies the Creative Writing distribution.

  
  • ENG 415 - Seminar: A: Poetics of Relation or B: Style


    415 A Poetics of Relation
    Instructor

    Flanagan 

    Poetics of Relation is the rubric for a seminar in which students will analyze the ways in which the discursive forms-novels, plays, essays, and poetry-of two writers relate to specific cultures, landscapes, and historical moments. In its two previous iterations, students have examined such relationships in writings by Nobel Laureates Derek Walcott, Vidia Naipaul, and Wole Soyinka. In Spring 2016, the focus will be, for the first time, on two African American female writers, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

    In addition to close readings, substantive discussions, oral presentations and one major essay, seminar participants will add to an existing Poetics of Relation digital website available through the Davidson College library.

    Counts for Africana Studies Department Minor credit.

    415 B Style
    Instructor

    Fackler

    From Samuel Richardson’s titular heroine Pamela obsessing about her wardrobe (1740), to the conspicuous consumption of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and from the discussion of Hero’s sartorial choices in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) to the iconic Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), there is a clear literary history of fashion. This course will consider both fictional and theoretical engagements with fashion alongside the works of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James, whose prose reveals the fingerprint specificity of their writing styles. Working from Roland Barthes’s theory in The Fashion System to Cecil Beaton’s diaries and Joseph Roach’s study of the “It” factor (“the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people”), this transcultural and transhistorical course will investigate style as both form and content. Whether we are looking at the fashion and literary styles of the roaring twenties in Fitzgerald’s works or the punk subcultures of the UK in the 1980s, we will question how literary innovation and fashion interpenetrate.

    Counts as an innovation course for the major.


  
  • ENG 416 - Style


    Instructor
    Fackler

    From Samuel Richardson’s titular heroine Pamela obsessing about her wardrobe (1740), to the conspicuous consumption of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and from the discussion of Hero’s sartorial choices in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) to the iconic Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), there is a clear literary history of fashion. This course will consider both fictional and theoretical engagements with fashion alongside the works of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James, whose prose reveals the fingerprint specificity of their writing styles. Working from Roland Barthes’s theory in The Fashion System to Cecil Beaton’s diaries and Joseph Roach’s study of the “It” factor (“the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people”), this transcultural and transhistorical course will investigate style as both form and content. Whether we are looking at the fashion and literary styles of the roaring twenties in Fitzgerald’s works or the punk subcultures of the UK in the 1980s, we will question how literary innovation and fashion interpenetrate.
     

  
  • ENG 420 - Seminar: Narrative Theory


    Instructor
    Miller

    This course will consider theories of narrative by focusing on the ways in which the media of orality, print, film and electronic text affect techniques and theories of narration.  Subjects will range from Plato to postmodernism.  We won’t simply read theory, but also apply theory to a wide range of narratives in different material media: print works by authors such as Mansfield, Wharton, Coetzee, Dostoevsky, D. F. Wallace, and Dr. Seuss; oral tales and jokes; video games; hypertext novels; television shows; advertisements; and films.

  
  • ENG 443 - Seminar: The Canterbury Tales


    Instructor
    Staff 

    Geoffrey Chaucer, an English civil servant and diplomat who was the son of a wine merchant, lived in the fourteenth century;  at his death in 1400, he was still working on an audacious experiment called The Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer, the Father of English Literature, was a creation of that unfinished  narrative experiment in testing the boundaries of fiction making-an experiment which began to be avidly read in the fifteenth century, which created anxiety of influence for sixteenth-century writers (such as Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare), which helped define by its perceived otherness both nostalgic Romantic  medievalism and unflinching modernity, and which, in the twenty- first century, has seemed, in its deliberate evasions and cancellations, the most postmodern of texts.  This seminar on The Canterbury Tales will read closely  what is arguably the most seminal of all English literary texts-while also exploring The Canterbury Tales in afterlife by considering the dialogue between Chaucer’s Middle English tales and their appropriations and transformations in later works ranging from the play Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare to films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Marxist adaptation of 1972 and Brian Helgeland’s  A Knight’s Tale (2001) with its odd, naked, medieval author, who wanders into the scene to claim that “Geoffrey Chaucer’s the name…writing’s the game.”

  
  • ENG 452 - Seminar: Performing Shakespeare/Radio Shakespeare


    Instructor
    Lewis

    In Shakespeare’s London, audience members referred not to “watching” or “seeing” a play, but to “hearing” it.

    “Radio Shakespeare” is a new incarnation of English 452, “Performing Shakespeare.”  The course will culminate in three full-length radio performances of The Merchant of Venice before live audiences.  A fourth performance, a Sunday matinee on the order of a staged reading, may occur at the Zimmermanns’ Renaissance villa, Pian del Pino.  One of the audio performances will be broadcast live on WDAV.  Post-production, engineers will assemble an immortal podcast combining the strongest elements of the three recorded performances into one whole.

     

  
  • ENG 455 - Seminar: A: Renaissance Revenge or B: Reading Endings


    Renaissance Revenge
    Instructor
     
    Ingram 

    The words “Renaissance” and “revenge” are usually followed by a third:  “tragedy.”  This seminar will indeed survey selected Renaissance revenge tragedies, those bloody, perverse, ironic plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  But this seminar will also consider other Renaissance works driven by revenge, including comedies and poems.  It will trace the roots of Renaissance revenge in works such as Seneca’s Thyestes and Machiavelli’s The Prince and the legacy of Renaissance revenge in works such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Tarantino’s Kill Bill.  We will study revenge as a means of balancing a plot (one injury initiates the action; another ends it), as economic exchange (the inexact calculations of payback), as an aesthetic form (heads baked in pies, corpses arranged in tableaux), as political resistance (the state’s revenge is called “justice”), and as grounds for theological questioning (when is an avenger an instrument of divine will?).  We will ask, finally, about revenge as a component of modernity, inherited from the Renaissance and canonized in the most conspicuously modern of early modern plays, that masterpiece of Renaissance revenge called Hamlet.


    Reading Endings
    Instructor

    Ingram

    This course focuses on endings.  It includes unfinished texts that authors or their executors decided to publish incomplete.  It also includes texts with notoriously controversial endings.  Students will reflect on what they want from endings and will reflect on the implications of those desires.  Most expansively, students will consider and perhaps fashion a fitting end to their majors in English.

    As befits its focus on endings, ENG 455 satisfies the requirement for a “capstone experience” within the English major.  This course is a tutorial; students will meet with the professor in very small groups and will set topics for discussion through their writing.

    Texts may include the following:  Anglo-Saxon poem “The Ruin”; Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde; Shakespeare’s sonnets and Measure for Measure; poetic fragments by Donne, Milton and Coleridge; unfinished, posthumously published novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and David Foster Wallace; Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending; films directed by Stephen Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan.

      

     

    Prerequisites & Notes
    First-year students require permission of the instructor.

  
  • ENG 462 - Seminar: A: Romantic Radicalism or B: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic


    Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.


    462A Romantic Radicalism

    Instructor
    Vaz

    For William Godwin, truth, if it exists, comes about in the “collision of mind with mind.”  In this seminar, we will investigate and interrogate how Romantic literature manifests this “collision” by creating and participating in the aesthetic, economic, and socio-political tectonic shifts of the period.  By doing so, we will examine how Romantic literature intersects with the richness and complexity of the period’s radical and revolutionary thought.

    462B The Long Eighteeth Century Gothic

    lnstructor

    Vaz

    There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read.  That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception.  Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hotcakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama.  In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760’s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worth of scholarship only in the last 30 years of the twentieth century

     

  
  • ENG 472 - Seminar A: Gossip or B: Twenty-First-Century British Literature or C: Joyce/Nabokov


    Check the schedule to determine which section is being offered.
     

    472A Gossip

    Instructor
    Fackler

    Drawing on cultural studies and performance studies, this trans-historical and transnational course investigates the role gossip plays in literature, psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, film, and new media. The seminar foregrounds the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality.

    This topic counts for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major.
     

    472B 21st Century British Literature

    Instructor
    Fackler

    This course considers the transformation of the book as artifact and idea since the turn of the century. We will investigate the new, often experimental, narrative forms authors have developed as a response to such twenty-first-century pressures as globalization, terrorism, and genetic engineering. Questions for the seminar include: What are the overarching concerns for fiction in the wake of the postmodern and postcolonial moment? What kind of relationship can we expect between science and literature in the 21st-century novel? Does contemporary science contribute to newly emergent structures of feeling that the novel might register? And if such structures call up concepts of the posthuman, how might they sit with the traditionally humanistic orientation of the novel as a broadly popular genre?  How does post-9/11 fiction respond to current fears of technological and/or natural annihilation? What are the factors determining pre-canonical status for the texts on this syllabus, and how can we understand the new circulation of global capital and cultural value? Students will consider the following concepts: virtual fiction; cloning, the post-human, and dystopian responses to the possibility of a genetically engineered future; alternative modes of narration; the figure of the artist manqué; ghostwriting as a narrative technique (and as a 21st-century replacement for the omniscient narrator); detective fiction; fictions of terrorism and the politics of post-9/11 vulnerability; the new Bildungsroman; the author business, and the influence of book clubs and literary prizes such as the Man Booker. 
     

    472C Joyce/Nabokov

    Instructor

    Kuzmanovich

    Why a seminar on Joyce/Nabokov?   Like most seminars, this one requires intensive attention to the themes and techniques of  major writers.  These two long dead writers consists of their still having in print almost all the books they’ve written,  with those books provoking over 10,000 critical pieces just since 1963.  Joyce’s influence is acknowledged by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Umberto Eco, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Raymond Queneau, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, and Derek Walcott while Martin Amis,  John Barth, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Bobby Ann Mason, James Merrill, Thomas Pynchon, W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith, Mark Strand,  Amy Tan, and Richard Wilbur mention Nabokov’s, and probably Joyce’s by way of Nabokov.

    Method:  We will concentrate on (1) their styles (Joyce’s “High Modernist” and Nabokov’s supposed “post-modernist”/”metafictional”/”intertextual” one) since the grit in these men’s words has gotten under the skin of many a reader with an innovative critical approach; (2) their tendencies to generate their respective narrative authority from events in their own lives, especially their respective experiences of exile; (3) their depictions of Love in its various forms (including the loss of it); (4) the absenting presence of the big bogey, Death; and (5) the last member of that robust triumvirate, Art. 

    Goals:   A foretaste of mature and thoughtful reading; confidence that you can do independent, original,  and careful scholarship on even the most challenging writing.

    But is this class really for you?  If you believe that certain words or subjects should be off-limits to writers or readers, this is not the class for you.  Ulysses and Lolita each continue to sell well over 100,000 copies per year, yet they not only contain but also provoke language and situations which some students may find objectionable.  This is a class for those students who not only possess the already uncommon share of discipline, imagination, memory, and attention to details vouchsafed to most who choose Davidson, but who are also blessed with an ability to heft another’s words and deliver and withstand therapeutic non-rancorous badgering especially on the topics of  suspending disbelief in the transfigurative power of art and the (ir)relevance of contemporary critical theory. 

    Texts: 0-14-024774-2 Joyce,  Dubliners; 670-0 180301; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; 0-19-511029-3 Fargnoli: James Joyce A-Z 0-394-74312-1; Joyce: Ulysses, Gabler Edition;  0-679-72725-6 Nabokov, Gift; 1-883011-18-3 Novels and Memoirs; 1-883011-19-1 Novels 1955-1962 0-679-72997-6; Nabokov,  Stories  of Vladimir Nabokov; 052153643X; Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (Recommended Only); 0-679-72609-8 Nabokov: Strong Opinions (Recommended Only); 978-0-3-0-7-27189-1Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Recommended Only)

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Juniors and Seniors only. 

  
  • ENG 473 - Seminar: Picturing Texts, Making Media


    Instructor
    Churchill
     

    This seminar explores various ways that words and images combine to make meanings. You will study a range of word-image texts, from illuminated books and graphic narratives, to digital poetry and blogs. You will write critical papers about these image-texts, and you’ll create your own. The seminar is a double hybrid–word/image texts and critical/creative writing–designed to stimulate your intellectual and imaginative faculties, and to help you develop literacies for the digital age, including mastery of WordPress. No previous technological training required.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    (Not offered Fall 2015.)

  
  • ENG 482 - Seminar: Poetics of Relation - Toni Morrison and Alice Walker


    Instructor
    Flanagan 

    Poetics of Relation is the rubric for a seminar in which students will analyze the ways in which the discursive forms-novels, plays, essays, and poetry-of two writers relate to specific cultures, landscapes, and historical moments. In its two previous iterations, students have examined such relationships in writings by Nobel Laureates Derek Walcott, Vidia Naipaul, and Wole Soyinka. In Spring 2016, the focus will be, for the first time, on two African American female writers, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. In addition to close readings, substantive discussions, oral presentations and one major essay, seminar participants will add to an existing Poetics of Relation digital website available through the Davidson College library.

    Counts for Africana Studies Department Minor credit.  Counts for Cultural Diversity requirement.

  
  • ENG 485 - Seminar: Picturing Texts, Making Media


    Instructor
    Churchill

    This seminar explores various ways that words and images combine to make meanings.  You will study a range of word-image texts, from illuminated books and graphic narratives, to digital poetry and blogs.  You will write critical papers about these image-texts, and you’ll create your own.  The seminar is a double hybrid-word/image texts and critical/creative writing-designed to stimulate your intellectual and imaginative faculties, and to help you develop literacies for the digital age, including mastery of WordPress.  No previous technological training is required.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    This course counts as an innovative course for the major.

  
  • ENG 486 - Seminar A: Emily Dickinson - The Art of Poetry or B: Faulkner or C: Modernism, Magazines & Media


    Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.


    486A Emily Dickinson - The Art of Poetry

    Instructor

    Staff

    “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Emily Dickinson asks her reader. Our goal this semester will be to respond to that challenge by investigating Dickinson’s vast collection of poems, placing them in the context of her life and time, and connecting them to contemporary poetic and critical responses to her work. Student participlation and leadership are essential.

    This topic only counts for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major.

    486B Faulkner

    Instructor
    Kuzmanovich
     

    “[S]ublimating the actual into apocryphal” is what Faulkner called his acts of storytelling about his families and his loners traumatized by war, race, poverty, sexual frustration, and greed; his psychologically fragile but tireless talkers,  incestuous brothers and sons, fiercely proud and resentful old ladies,  skeletal bridegrooms, and children who grow up honorable by keeping  the promises they make both to themselves and to others.  Our seminar will try to give equal due to the actual and the apocryphal which means we’ll pay attention to:

    • history, especially of the Civil War and Reconstruction; 
    • geography, especially of Lafayette County and the Mississippi River;
    • biography, not just Faulkner’s but his grandfather’s, known in the family as the Old Colonel); and
    • other writing that finds its way into Faulkner’s own (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Conrad, Fitzgerald, even Charlotte Bronte and Dickens).

    To benefit from these overlapping and interlocking contexts, we are going to limit ourselves to the works  Faulkner  wrote primarily between 1929 and 1948.  If there is interest, we’ll  visit Faulkner’s stomping grounds in Oxford, Mississippi.

    We are going to omit the Snopes trilogy unless you think we must do it.  During the first half of the course, under the rubric of the actual (and in the process of unlearning certain ways of reading Faulkner), we’ll read some of Faulkner’s best known short stories, and then The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), The Unvanquished  (1938), and Intruder in the Dust (1948).  To bury our noses in the grit of the actual, we’ll  take a break to visit Faulkner’s grave, house, church, courthouse, alley, statue, Taylor’s Depot, etc. in Oxford, MS and also look at the architectural and geological features that served or are rumored to have served as models for a number of  Faulkner’s settings. When we return, we’ll concentrate on Absalom, Absalom!  (in Faulkner’s view “the best novel yet written by an American”) and on the ways that novel inscribed itself into the realm of great novels while simultaneously appropriating that apocryphal realm for itself.   While the themes that will guide our discussion will no doubt include the South, the Civil War, honor, heroism, guilt, adolescence, masculinity and femininity, sex and death, truth and fact, obsession,  lynching, incest, religious vision, the Bible, Greek mythology, the presence of Shakespeare and other poets in Faulkner’s lyrical perversities of plot and style, as well as psychological and philosophical notions of time, memory, history, and storytelling,  there is no reason to stop with any of them.  Please prepare yourself for some heavy lifting when it comes to making this seminar a success or do the right thing and cede your place to one of the people on the wait list.

     

    486C Modernism, Magazines & Media

    Instructor
    Churchill

    The rise of modernism in the first decades of the 20th century coincided with an explosion in magazines production: between 1885 and 1905 alone, 7500 new periodicals were established in the U. S., and thousands more in Great Britain. This seminar will explore modernism as it appeared in magazines, ranging from the avant-garde “little magazines” to the “quality” monthlies and mass-market glossies. Langston Hughes debuted in The Crisis in 1921, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared in The Dial in 1922, the same year James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review (before it was censored by the Comstock commission). Willa Cather edited McCall’s, Djuna Barnes wrote for the pulps, and William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald published stories in the Saturday Evening Post. By the 1920s, modernists such as Pablo Picasso and Virginia Woolf had become celebrities, featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair. 

    This seminar is unlike any English course you’ve had at Davidson. It is a collaborative research & methods course, with readings drawn from the emerging field of modern periodical studies. You will find and choose at least half of the readings, “publish” one of your findings in whatever form or format you see fit, collaborate on a major research project, and contribute to the expansion of the web site Index of Modernist Little Magazines. In the process, you will enter the field of new digital media, learning to use WordPress, GoogleDocs, DavidsonDomains, and other digital tools and platforms.

  
  • ENG 487 - Seminar: Legal Fiction


    Instructor
    Nelson

    The principal claim of English 487 is that a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read. Indeed, modern trials are in effect storytelling contests, with two competing “narrators” telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience. Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions. Nevertheless, a great deal of contemporary literary theory offers genuine insight into the kinds of fictions that get constructed in a courtroom. This seminar tests a number of hypotheses about legal fictions, offers direct observation of some real trials in progress, and asks students to undertake research in the interdisciplinary areas where legal studies and literary studies overlap.
     

  
  • ENG 493 - Seminar: Picturing Texts, Making Media


    Instructor
    Churchill

    This seminar explores various ways that words and images combine to make meanings. You will study a range of word-image texts, from illuminated books and graphic narratives, to digital poetry, memes, and blogs. You will write critical papers about these image-texts, and you’ll create your own. The seminar is a double hybrid-word/image texts and critical/creative writing-designed to stimulate your intellectual and imaginative faculties, and to help you develop literacies for the digital age, including mastery of WordPress. In the second half of the semester, you will work in teams to design and create your own hybrid projects. No previous technological training is required.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Limited to juniors and seniors.

  
  • ENG 494 - Seminar: A: Disability in Literature or B: Multicultural Literature


    Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.


    494A Disability in Literature

    Instructor
    Fox

    The literary tradition in Engish is rife with representation of disability.  These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil.  Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death.  Disability Studies asks us to reframe our understanding of disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and understand and learn about the presence of “disability culture” and its widely diverse members are also using literature to tell their own stories in a vibrant new artistic tradition.  Literature is and has been obsessed with the disabled body, both as metaphor and actual subject – an extension of the degree to which disability has loomed in the larger societal imagination in one way or another across centuries.

    Rather than trying to catalogue all the examples of disability in literature, this seminar seeks to use disabililty studies as a genesis point and theoretical framework through which to examine several core questions about disability, literature, and the problems and opportunities arising from the intersection of the two.  We will:

    • Recconsider representations of disability in literary, artistic, and cultural texts.  We’ll ask how these are used as “narrative prosthesis.”  How are such depictions used as literary devices?  What beliefs do these images promote about disability?
    • Examine how “disability” and “normalcy” are culturally constructed categories like race, gender, class, and sexuality.  How does disability intersect with these other identity categories?
    • Study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture. This writing establishes history, explores identity, refutes/reclaims stereotypes, and promotes discourse within the disability community.  We will look at genres ranging from memoir to fiction to performance to film.
    • Consider how a “disability aesthtic” of literature might be conceived.  How can disability contribute to the reconsideration of the processes and products of literary creation?

    Therefore, while our course has a loose chronological frame, it’s more appropriate to think of it as organized conceptually.  The survey here will be of the questions to which the intersection of disability and literature gives rise.  While this is a senior English seminar, disability studies is a very interdisciplinary field.  Junior and senior students in other majors with an interest in the course topic are very welcome to join; the course does not presuppose a familiarity with disability studies.

    Fulfills the Cultural Diversity requirement as well as the Diversity requirement for the English major. 

     

    494B Multicultural Literature

    Instructor
    Campbell

    Beyond just teaching children letters, counting, and shames, children’s literature teaches individuals how to interact with one another based on their similarities and differences.  This seminar will explore how what is accepted and promoted as “appropriate” multicultural representation in literature for children and adolescent changes over time.  At a moment of intense American debates about immigration, demographic shifts, and marriage equality, we will explore issues of power and representation-who has the right to write, whose stories are worth telling, what version of those stories should one tell through focusing on literature for children, including picture books, stories, comics, and short novels.

    Fulfills the Cultural Diversity requirement.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Juniors and seniors only.

  
  • ENG 495 - Seminar: Cleopatra


    495G Cleopatra

    Instructor
    Lewis

    Cleopatra has endured as an icon from her own lifetime to the present.  Was she among the first feminists or as poisonous as the asp that took her life?  This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the fascination with and manipulation of Cleopatra’s image over the centuries.  Beginning with Stacy Schiff’s recent biography of her, we’ll explore her appropriation by such authors as Plutarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Shaw, as well as by visual artists and in films like Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor. 

    Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Not open to first-year students and sophomores without instructor’s permission.  

  
  • ENG 498 - Seminar: Senior Honors Research


    Instructor 
    Campbell, Ingram, Kuzmanovich

    Reading and research for the honors thesis taught by the student’s thesis director and the departmental program coordinator. Ordinarily, taken in the fall of the senior year.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Permission of the instructor required.

     

  
  • ENG 499 - Seminar: Senior Honors Thesis


    Instructor 
    Campbell, Ingram, Kuzmanovich

    Writing of the honors thesis begun in English 498, supervised by the student’s thesis director and supported by instruction of the departmental program coordinator. Ordinarily, taken in the spring of the senior year.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Permission of the instructor required.

  
  • ENV 120 - Introduction to Environmental Geology


    Instructor
    Johnson

    A study of basic geologic principles and critical issues in environmental geology on a global scale. Topics to be covered can include: minerals, rock types and cycles, earthquakes and tectonics, volcanoes, mass wasting, stream systems, coastlines, soils, water resources, mineral and rock resources, fossil fuels, and climate change. Generally, the class will divide time between learning introductory geologic principles and applying those principles to understand environmental issues associated with geology.

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Natural Science distribution requirement.
    Students entering before 2012: satisfies Laboratory Science distribution requirement.
    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 150 - Environmental Analysis with Econ Lens


    Instructor
    Martin

    The course will introduce students to thinking about interdisciplinary environmental issues as an economist does.  We will concentrate on a few economics themes and use topical issues to motivate and to illustrate interdisciplinary economic analyses.Note: The course does not earn economics credit and does not replace the Economics 101 prerequisite for any of the three Economics environmental courses (ECO 226, 235, or 236).  

    Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies

    Satisfies a minor requirement in Environmental Studies

    Satisfies the Liberal Studies Distribution Requirement

  
  • ENV 160 - Environmental Justice


    Instructor
    Merrill

    This course introduces students to the concepts, contexts, and conflicts of environmental justice, both in the U.S. and globally.  After covering some general history and theoretical frameworks, the course is organized according to six cases studies (Love Canal, Hurricane Katrina, Hydro-Quebec, US migrant farmworkers, Bhopal, and Ogoniland).  Throughout this interdisciplinary course based in the environmental humanities, students will make connections among various kinds of information sources (literary, documentary, ecocritical, theoretical, ethical, historical, etc.).  For the final course project, students will create their own environmental justice case study, based on a case not covered in class, and with their choice of relevant literary text, documentary film, and background readings.

    Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major

    Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies minor

    Satisfies the Liberal Studies requirement

    Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement

  
  • ENV 181 - Food and Sustainability: Introduction to the Farm at Davidson


    Instructor
    Green

    Did you know your college has a student farm? In this course, we will combine hands-on experience learning to grow food at the Farm at Davidson with readings, lectures and discussions that address local food systems. Our goal will be to critically analyze some of the issues facing our local food system through positive engagement with sustainable solutions. This course serves as a prerequisite for the spring research seminar where students will have an opportunity to conduct research at the Farm.

    Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 201 - Environmental Science


    Instructor
    Staff

    Overview of the scientific concepts, principles, processes, and methodologies required to understand how ecosystems work. This knowledge will be applied to selected environmental problems to help students understand the scientific basis, estimate the risks associated, and evaluate alternative solutions for resolving and/or preventing them.  One laboratory meeting per week.

    Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Natural Science distribution requirement.
    Students entering before 2012: satisfies Laboratory Science distribution requirement.

  
  • ENV 202 - Environmental Social Sciences


    Instructors
    Staff

    Overview of social science approaches to environmental issues, with problem-based and topical approaches to the study of interactions between society and the environment. This course teaches students to integrate concepts and the qualitative and quantitative methods of the social sciences (primarily anthropology, economics, geography, psychology, political science, and sociology) in interdisciplinary analyses of environmental issues.

    Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
    Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.

  
  • ENV 203 - Environmental Humanities


    Instructor
    Staff

    Overview of humanistic approaches to environmental issues, including perspectives from art, cultural studies, history, literature, philosophy, and religion.  This course emphasizes humanistic methodologies such as close reading and analysis of primary and secondary materials in both written and visual forms.

    Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

  
  • ENV 210 - Introduction to Environmental Literature: Food Literature


    Instructor
    Mangrum

    This course is for Foodies, Ag Activists, Farm Fans, and anyone who is interested in literature about food from a variety of perspectives.  We’ll read fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about the pleasures of eating, the cultural and aesthetic significance of food, rural and urban agriculture, and food justice.  Field trips will include farm visits, and students will participate in hands-on, community-based assignments connected to the college’s Food and Sustainability project. 

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 220 - Climate Systems: Present and Past


    Instructor
    Backus

    The climate of the Earth is changing. It has always changed. It will continue to change. How do we assess the impact of humanity on climate? We need to understand how our Earth system works, now and in the past, if we expect to predict our climatic future. This course looks at the current climate system and explores the Earth archives that illuminate our climatic past.  Topics covered include: The Earth energy budget; the role of carbon dioxide and methane in short-term and long-term climate cycles; orbital cycles and the ice ages; Earth as a snowball; the Greenhouse Earth; ice cores and tree rings; oceanic and atmospheric circulation systems; and the impact of human activity on climate. Class discussions, demonstrations, and exercises provide opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and practice analytical techniques.

    Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

    Satisfies a distribution requirement in Liberal Studies

  
  • ENV 232 - Introduction to Environmental Health with Community-Based Learning (=HHV 232)


    Instructors
    Staff

    Students will apply biological, chemical and epidemiological content to environmental health case studies and community-based learning projects. This is an introductory course designed to expose students to different scientific disciplines within the context of environmental health.

    Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Health and Human Values.
    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.
     

    Prerequisites & Notes
    ENV 232 may not be taken for credit after ENV 233.

  
  • ENV 233 - Introduction to Environmental Health with Laboratory-Based Learning (=HHV 233)


    Instructors
    Staff

    Students will apply biological, chemical and epidemiological content to environmental health case studies and laboratory projects. This is an introductory course designed to expose students to different scientific disciplines within the context of environmental health. ENV 233 may not be taken for credit after ENV 232.

    Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Health and Human Values.
    Satisfies the Natural Science distribution requirement.
    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 235 - The Ocean Environment


    Instructor
    Backus

    Covering 71% of the surface, yet mostly unexplored, the Earth’s oceans are a source of food, hurricanes, used as a wastebasket by human kind, and a great unknown in our climate future. This introductory course covers the formation of ocean basins; the composition and origin of seawater; currents, tides, and waves; the ocean-atmosphere connection; coastal processes; the deep-sea environment; productivity and resources; marine pollution; and the influence of oceans on climate. The class will focus on how oceanic systems work with class discussions, demonstrations, and exercises providing opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and practice analytical techniques.

    Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Satisfies Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

  
  • ENV 240 - Indian Environment and Ecology


    Instructor

    Staff

    This course, offered as part of the Davidson-in-India program, is an introduction to and comparative analysis of a variety of ecosystems in south India. Topics include tropical ecosystems’ structure and dynamics, past and present human interaction with the landscape, adaptations of flora and fauna, and natural history, life history and human interactions and influences.

    Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Liberal Studies distribution requirement.
    Students entering before 2012: satisfies natural science without a lab distribution requirement

  
  • ENV 250 - Human Geography Theory and Research


    Instructor
    Staff

    The core of geographic thought is a spatial understanding of nature-society interactions, and knowledge and theoretically informed practice that synthesizes across nature/society divides. The first part of this course explores major thinkers and key theoretical developments in the field of human geography, tracing the evolution of the discipline from its origins in classical thought to contemporary cutting edge theoretical discourses. This course explores geographic thought, various ways to ask geographic research questions, and appropriate methodologies to collect, analyze, and represent geographic data, through both quantitative and qualitative traditions. By exploring both theoretical underpinnings and current methodologies, this course provides insights into a profound discipline concerned with the myriad relationships between people and nature.

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Social-Scientific distribution requirement.
    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Social Sciences Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

    Not offered in 2016-2017.

  
  • ENV 281 - Contemporary Southern Literature (=ENG 281)


    Instructor
    Mangrum

    A survey of literature from the Contemporary South, with particular attention to the ecological challenges and tumultuous environmental history of the region.  Familiarity with Southern literature is not a requirement.

    Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
    During 2016-2017, satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 283 - Global Food Systems


    Instructor
    Green

    Creating a sustainable world food system requires that we address both food security and sustainable food production in tandem, a clear case of intersecting challenges or “wicked” problems. Wicked problems are those issues that have so many relationships of causality and correlation that researchers and policy-makers sometimes do not know where to begin to address them. In this course, we will begin to investigate some of the ways we can understand and address the challenges of producing and provisioning food using the lens of sustainability.

    Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 290 - Deserts


    Instructors
    Johnson, Merrill

    Deserts are among the most hostile environments on earth for the survival of humans, yet their allure has resulted in profound impacts on civilizations. Religions view deserts paradoxically as places of isolation and of deep spiritual connection. Artists and writers exploit these sparse landscapes of seemingly infinite vistas to highlight the singular aesthetics of this (allegedly) empty wilderness.  Geologists have long asserted that deserts are so unique that they require their own set of processes to explain the landforms. Climatologists realize that deserts are not local phenomena, but rather are globally forced features based on worldwide circulation and heating patterns.  In this transdisciplinary and team-taught course, students will learn about deserts from multiple perspectives and through approaches both humanistic and scientific. 

     

    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science or Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
    Satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

  
  • ENV 295 - Independent Study


    Staff

    Under the direction of an ENV Core faculty member, the student learns environmental studies material through a structure that primarily resembles a typical course or through independent research at an introductory level.

  
  • ENV 303 - Research Seminar in Food and Agriculture Studies


    Instructor
    Green

    In this course, you will gain hands-on experience conducting social science research in the discipline of food and agriculture studies. Our research site is The Farm at Davidson College. Our goal is to design and implement a group study that measures the Farm holistically along the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social sustainability. As a student in this class, you will be held to high expectations. Not only will you be responsible for reading assigned materials, you will be expected to conduct yourself as a professional scholar responsible for developing research questions, collecting, analyzing, storing and presenting data in an ethical, confidential and transparent manner. Our course will culminate in a presentation of our findings to the Davidson College community. Students in this course are expected to already have a working knowledge of the Farm at Davidson College. Please contact the instructor if you would like to enroll in the course and need extra material to familiarize yourself with the Farm.

    Satisfies a requirement in the social science track in the Environmental Studies major.
    Satisfies the social science breath course in the Environmental Studies Interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 315 - Analytical Chemistry I (= CHE 220)


    Instructors
    Blauch, Hauser

    Topics in chemical equilibrium, electrochemistry, spectroscopy, chromatography, and nuclear chemistry, with applications in biological, environmental, forensic, archaeological, and consumer chemistry. Laboratory experiments include qualitative and quantitative analyses using volumetric, electrochemical, chromatographic, and spectroscopic methods.


    Satisfies the Natural Science distribution requirement.

    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

  
  • ENV 330 - Surface Geology and Landforms


    Instructor
    Johnson

    A detailed survey of processes in surface geology including weathering, soils, landslides, stream systems, glaciers, and climate as well as differences between these processes in various environments.  The class will split time between learning and discussion of geomorphic principles and practicing them in the field.  The class will be roughly based around the collection of new field data for an overarching class project.

    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in the Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    ENV 120 or ENV 201 or instructor permission.

  
  • ENV 335 - Soil Science


    Instructor
    Johnson

    Understanding geologic landscapes and surficial processes requires a multidisciplinary understanding of soils.  This course will examine soils with a focus on soil-forming processes and morphology.  In the classroom, students will learn the terminology and concepts of soil genesis, soil taxonomy, and soil morphology.  These concepts will then be applied in the field so that students can learn to identify and interpret horizonation and morphological characteristics. 

    Students entering before 2012:  satisfies Natural Science distribution requirement.
    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in the Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
    Satisfies Archaeology interdisciplinary minor requirements.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    ENV 120 or ENV 201 or instructor permission.

  
  • ENV 356 - Diversity & Extinction Analysis (= BIO 356)


    Instructor
    K. Smith

    This group investigation course focuses on the analysis of patterns of biodiversity and biodiversity loss. Students conduct literature reviews to compile data on biodiversity and/or extinction events to identify patterns of biodiversity, biodiversity function, and extinctions, with the goal of understanding the causes and consequences of biodiversity variation and loss. An emphasis is placed on the analysis of biodiversity data and the development of novel analyses to address issues such as sampling effects, extinction bias, random extinction, and emergent properties of biodiversity. The course culminates with a group project that addresses student-driven questions via the application of analyses developed during the semester.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Successful completion of BIO 112/114 and BIO 227 or 321 is required.  Completion of BIO 240 is recommended.

  
  • ENV 366 - Renew Natural Resources: Science and Policy (= BIO 366, ANT 382)


    Instructors
    Lozada, Paradise

    This interdisciplinary seminar course focuses on developing a scientific understanding of renewable natural resources such as fisheries and forests and how resources are then used, overused, managed, and conserved by humans.  The course primarily consider smodern methods of resource management, including adaptive and ecosystem-based management.  The course builds upon knowledge gained in the foundation courses of Anthropology, Biology, or Environmental Studies.  It addresses natural resource and environmental issues from ecosystem and policy perspectives.  Through case studies, readings, class discussions, and knowledge construction, students gain deep knowledge of ecosystem ecology and management policies and approaches.  Students then apply their knowledge to identify management principles that are consistent with a more holistic ecosystem approach and develop a case study of one natural resource and how it is managed.

    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural or Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor or the breadth requirement of the Humanities track.

  
  • ENV 367 - Ecotoxicology (= BIO 367)


    Instructor
    Paradise

    Ecotoxicology is the science that examines the fate and effects of toxicants in and on ecological systems.  While toxicology examines effects at molecular, cell, and organism levels, effects at higher levels are not always predictable based on findings at lower levels. Ecotoxicology integrates effects at multiple levels of biological organization.

    Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    BIO 111 and 112 (or 113 and 114) or ENV 201 required and permission of the instructor required; CHE 115 recommended.

  
  • ENV 395 - Independent Research


    Under the direction of an ENV Core faculty member, the student engages in independent research at an advanced level.

  
  • ENV 495 - Independent Research


    Under the direction of an ENV Core faculty member, the student engages in independent research at a very advanced level.

  
  • ENV 497 - Honors Research


    Under the direction of an ENV Core faculty member, the student engages in research as part of pursuing Honors in Environmental Studies.

  
  • ENV 498 - Environmental Studies Capstone I


    Instructors
    Hauser and Merrill

    In collaboration with their capstone mentor, students will formally propose and carry out a project based on fieldwork and/or substantive library research in the area of the student’s depth component track - Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, or self-designed.  Projects will demonstrate an integration of the methods and theory appropriate to the student’s depth component by investigating a question or problem that is significant, situated, and original in its application within the context of Environmental Studies.

    Satisfies major requirement in Environmental Studies.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    ENV 201, ENV 202, ENV 203. Offered in the Fall. 

  
  • ENV 499 - Environmental Studies Capstone II


    Instructors
    Hauser and Merrill

    The goal of this course is to integrate the depth and breadth components of the Environmental Studies major as a complement to Capstone I.  The students will integrate information, concepts and methods learned in their previous courses to explore an environmental theme through an interdisciplinary lens, over a range of geographical scales and accounting for a variety of perspectives.

    Satisfies major requirement in Environmental Studies.
     

    Prerequisites & Notes
    ENV 498. Offered in the Spring.

  
  • ETH 236 - Ethics and Warfare


    Instructor
    Perry

    This course examines key philosophical and religious concepts in the history of moral deliberations about war, modern analyses of the diverse and sometimes conflicting moral principles that those traditions have bequeathed to us, and theories about why human beings engage in mass killing. Students will develop an appreciation for the richness of ethical thinking about war, and enhance their skills in applying moral philosophical reasoning to con­tem­porary wars. Questions that will be tackled in readings, class discussions and exams include: Do people have a right not to be killed? Is that right absolute, or not? If it’s an absolute right, how can war ever be justified? If that right is not absolute, can we nonetheless establish sensible limits on when and how war may be waged? Can we clearly distinguish between combatants and non­com­batants? If so, may noncombatants ever be directly targeted in war? If not, may they be threatened in order to deter attacks against us? Or is that equivalent to terrorism? What’s the right way to balance risks to noncombatants vs. risks to our troops?

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

  
  • ETH 237 - Business Ethics


    Instructor
    Perry

    What does society have a right to expect from corporations in the realm of moral respon­si­bility?  Do corporate leaders have any obligations beyond serving the interests of stockholders and obeying the law?  Do they have moral obligations to other “stakeholders” such as employees, consumers, suppliers, members of communities living near factories, et al.?  This course will address these and other related questions.

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

  
  • ETH 238 - Ethics in Professional Life


    Instructor
    Perry

    This course is intended  to foster your awareness of ethical concerns across a wide range of professions (such as law, medicine, journalism, and business); to enable you to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various moral beliefs and ethical arguments relative to professional life; and to reinforce your personal sense of compassion and fairness in the context of your future professional roles. Does loyalty to one’s professional clients permit one to ignore at least some ethical obligations that the rest of us would be condemned for violating? What counts as a conflict of interest in various professional contexts? How should physicians deal with tensions between preventing avoidable harms to their patients and respecting their autonomous choices? How far may lawyers go in protecting their clients’ interests? Must they defend clients they know are guilty? May they undermine the credibility of witnesses they know are testifying truthfully? Are business managers solely obligated to maximize stockholders’ wealth? Or do they have moral duties to other “stakeholders” as well?

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

  
  • ETH 239 - The Moral Status of Humans and Other Animals


    Instructor
    Perry

    There is a general consensus today that all people share a set of basic rights, or what might also be called full moral status. But we are less likely to agree about the moral status of human beings at the edges of life, such as early embryos (may we use them to extract stem cells, or freeze them indefinitely?) and individuals who are permanently unconscious (should they be considered dead?). We also have not reached a consensus about the moral status of various non-human animals: some cultures revere all living things, while others grant non-human animals little or no independent moral status at all. Some contemporary theorists argue that any sentient animals (capable of suffering) deserve to have their interests count in our moral deliberations; among them are many proponents of vegetarianism who regard our treatment of food animals as unnecessarily cruel. A few philosophers go so far as to argue that highly intelligent animals like chimpanzees and dolphins have rights like ours, and should not be kept in zoos or used in biomedical experiments. This course will explore these and other fascinating ethical questions, drawing in part on recent findings in neuroscience and zoology.

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

  
  • FMS 220 - Introduction to Film and Media Studies


    Instructors
    Lerner, McCarthy

    An introduction to the history and analysis of screen media, with an emphasis on film (feature films, documentaries, animation, and experimental) together with an examination of ways cinematic techniques of storytelling do and do not find their ways into later media like television and video games. Lectures and discussions supplemented by theoretical readings and weekly screenings.

    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
    Required course for fulfilling the Film and Media Studies Interdisciplinary Minor.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    (Fall)

  
  • FMS 321 - Interactive Digital Narratives


    Instructor
    Lerner

    A close study of selected video games using an interdisciplinary blend of methodologies culled from cultural studies, film and media studies theory, literary criticism, and history.

    Film and Media Studies Interdisciplinary Minor Credit.
    Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    FMS 220 or ENG 293.

  
  • FMS 323 - Special Topics in Digital Media and Film


    Instructor
    Staff

    An intensive investigation of digital media and film production.  Screenings, discussions, and readings will explore the theory and practice of a selected cinematic tradition.  Significant production component will include videography, non- linear video editing, lighting, and sound recording.

    Satisfies Film and Media Studies Interdisciplinary Minor requirement.
    Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
     

  
  • FMS 385 - Video Game Music (= MUS 385)


    Instructor
    Lerner

    Historical, stylistic, and analytic study of video game music from its origins in the arcade games of the 1970s to the present. Emphases on close readings of music in relation to gameplay, and vice versa. Includes training in digital audio manipulation to create sound design and musical sequences.

    Satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Normally offered in alternate years; not offered in 2016-17.

  
  • FMS 421 - Seminar in Film and Media Studies: After Birth of a Nation


    Instructor
    Lerner

    This seminar will take the occasion of the 100th anniversary of D. W. Griffith’s controversial film The Birth of a Nation (1915) as an invitation to conduct a close investigation of the original film and its impact on film history and U.S. culture along with a study of this film and the history and representation of racial identities in U.S. media. The historical scope of the seminar will reach back to the nineteenth century and up to the present, with attention given to Oscar Micheaux’s cinematic response (Within Our Gates) and the entire twentieth century history of what have been called “race movies.” Projects will include both scholarly writing along with production exercises involving editing, remixing, and re-composing. Weekly screenings expected outside of class.

    NOTE: This seminar will fulfill the 400-level capstone requirement for the FMS minor in 2015-16.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    FMS 220. (Fall)

  
  • FRE 101 - Elementary French I


    Instructor
    Slawy-Sutton

    Introductory French course developing basic proficiency in the four skills: oral comprehension, speaking, writing, and reading. Requires participation in AT sessions twice a week.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Normally, for students with no previous instruction in French. (Fall)

  
  • FRE 102 - Elementary French II


    Instructors
    Beschea

    Continuing development of basic proficiency in the four skills. Requires participation in AT sessions twice a week.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 101 at Davidson, placement examination, or permission of the department. (Fall and Spring)

  
  • FRE 103 - Intensive Beginning French (2 credits)


    Instructor
    Jacobus

    Beginning French. Learn conversational French quickly. Meets every day for 6 class-hours per week plus meetings with an assistant teacher (AT). Completes two semesters of French in one semester. Equivalent to French 101 and 102. Counts as two courses and prepares for French 201.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    (Fall)

  
  • FRE 201 - Intermediate French Through Cinema


    Instructors
    Kruger, Sainte-Claire

    Development of skills in spoken and written French, with extensive oral practice and grammar review. Requires participation in AT session once a week.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in foreign language.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 102 or 103-104 at Davidson, or placement exam.

  
  • FRE 212 - Oral Expression, Listening Comprehension and Practical Phonetics


    Instructors
    Beschea

    Discussion, continuing oral practice, and corrective pronunciation. Requires participation in weekly AT session.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 201, placement examination, or permission of the instructor. (Fall and Spring)

  
  • FRE 220 - Literature and Madness


    Instructor
    Sainte-Claire

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.
     

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 201 or above. (Spring)

  
  • FRE 221 - Visions of the City


    Instructor
    Staff

    Written and visual works that imagine cities and their inhabitants. Discussion topics will include the ways in which urban modernity changes Western conceptions of art, the social geography of space, the treatment of class and race, and immigration. Typical authors include Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, Apollinaire, Aragon, Pérec, and Beyala.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 210 or above. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 223 - Childhood and Youth


    Instructor
    Slawy-Sutton

    Literature treating the theme, “l’enfance et l’adolescence,” through different genres and literary periods. Typical authors: Maupassant, Colette, Prévert, Anouilh, Sarraute, Sebbar, Chedid.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 201 or above. (Fall)

  
  • FRE 225 - Rich and Poor


    Instructor
    Kruger

    Discussion of the theme of wealth and its place in a variety of literary forms and cultural contexts. Readings typically include plays, poetry, and fiction by French and Francophone authors such as Molière, La Bruyère, Balzac, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Proulx, Roy, and La Ferrière.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 201 or above. (Fall)

  
  • FRE 226 - Geographies of Desire


    Instructor
    Fache

    Desire is a passion that has driven men and women to build and destroy empires, and has thus been a topic and subject in French literature since medieval times. This course examines the various forms of desire, and maps the spaces and places in which it is expressed, from France to the confines of the colonial Empire and more recently the Francophone world.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 227 - Games People Play


    Instructor
    Jacobus

    People have long tried to get their own way by playing roles, persuading, cajoling, manipulating, bargaining, teasing, pretending. We follow these themes in great authors: Racine, Camus, Balzac, Prévert, Giraudoux, Anouilh, Follain, Marivaux. Plays, fiction, poetry.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 201 or above. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 228 - Introduction to Francophone Literature Abroad


    Course in literature taught by the Davidson program director in Tours.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

  
  • FRE 229 - Introduction to French and/or Francophone Literature Abroad


    Courses in literature taught by the Davidson program director in Tours.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

  
  • FRE 230 - Québec Through Film


    Instructor
    Kruger

    An introduction to contemporary Québec society as portrayed in film, with a focus on questions of individual and collective identities.  Students will develop critical skills as readers of film as they examine feature films, documentaries, and animated short subjects.  Typical directors include Arcand, Dolan, Jutra, Pool and Vallée. 

    Satisfies a major requirement in French and Francophone Studies.

    Satisfies a minor requirement in French and Francophone Studies.

    Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Prerequisite: FRE 201 or FRE 212.  Students who have completed FRE 220 or above must enroll in FRE 350.

    FRE 230 is dual-listed with FRE 350.

    (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 241 - Poetry, Passion, Painting


    Instructor
    Jacobus

    Poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Heather Dohollau, Anne Hébert. Close Reading. Resonances with impressionists and other art. Dynamics of image, rhythms, sounds, time, space, emotions, poetic voice.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    FRE 241 is dual-listed with FRE 341. FRE 241 is open to students coming out of FRE 201 or FRE 212 or the equivalents. Students who have completed FRE 220 or above must enroll in FRE 341. FRE 241 does not count in lieu of the requirement in “Introduction to Literature” for departmental majors and minors. (Fall)

  
  • FRE 242 - Autobiographies, Journals, Diaries (=FRE 321)


    Instructor
    Kruger

    Reading and discussion of first-person narratives from a variety of periods. Typical authors: Diderot, Guillerargues, Graffigny, Camus, Gide, Duras.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    FRE 201 or FRE 212. Students who have completed FRE 220 or above must enroll in FRE 321.

  
  • FRE 260 - Contemporary France


    Instructor
    Fache

    Contemporary French social and political institutions, attitudes and values, emphasizing current events. Especially recommended for those planning to study in France.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Liberal Studies.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 201 or above. (Spring)

  
  • FRE 287 - Studies in Civilization and Culture Abroad


    Courses on topics related to francophone civilization (e.g., culture, history, politics) taken at a university in a French-speaking country.

  
  • FRE 288 - Studies in Civilization and Culture Abroad


    Courses on topics related to francophone civilization (e.g., culture, history, politics) taken at a university in a French-speaking country.

  
  • FRE 295, 296, 297 - Independent Study for Non-Majors


    Individual work under the direction of a faculty member who reviews and approves the topic of study and determines the means of evaluation.

  
  • FRE 313 - Advanced Grammar Review and Written Expression


    Instructors
    Sainte-Claire

    Advanced work in written French.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 220 or above. (Spring)
     

  
  • FRE 320 - Husbands, Wives, and Lovers


    Instructor
    Kruger

    Study of representations of female adultery in the 19th century French novel with emphasis on the social stereotypes and cultural myths at play in French fiction. Typical authors: Flaubert, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Balzac, Sand, Maupassant, Mérimée.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered French 220 or above, or permission of the instructor. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 321 - Autobiographies, Journals, Diaries (=FRE 242)


    Instructor
    Kruger

    Reading and discussion of first-person narratives from a variety of periods. Typical authors: Diderot, Guillerargues, Graffigny, Camus, Gide, Duras.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered French 220 or above, or permission of the instructor. (Spring)

  
  • FRE 329 - Studies in the Novel


    Instructor
    Sutton

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    French 220 or above, or permission of the instructor. (Fall)

  
  • FRE 340 - Symbolist Poets: Drugs, Music, Revolt


    Instructor
    Jacobus

    Study of late 19th-century innovators in poetry: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and of their use of metaphor, syntax, image, rhythm, tonality, and literary references.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered French 220 or above. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 341 - Poetry, Passion, Painting


    Instructor
    Jacobus

    Poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Heather Dohollau, Anne Hébert. Close Reading. Resonances with impressionists and other art. Dynamics of image, rhythms, sounds, time, space, emotions, poetic voice.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered French 220 or above, or permission of the instructor. (Fall)
    FRE 341 is dual-listed with FRE 241.

  
  • FRE 343 - Cubist and Surrealist Poets


    Instructor
    Jacobus

    Study of Cubist and Surrealist artists, in particular poetry from the 1900s to 1930s: Appollinaire, Reverdy, Eluard, Aragon, and Breton.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.
     

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered 220 or above, or permission of the instructor. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 350 - Québec Through Film


    Instructor
    Kruger

    An introduction to contemporary Québec society as portrayed in film, with a focus on questions of individual and collective identities.  Students will develop critical skills as readers of film as they examine feature films, documentaries, and animated short subjects.  Typical directors include Arcand, Dolan, Jutra, Pool and Vallée. 

    Satisfies a major requirement in French and Francophone Studies.

    Satisfies a minor requirement in French and Francophone Studies.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Visual and Performing Arts.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Prerequisite: FRE 201 or FRE 212.  Students who have completed FRE 220 or above must enroll in FRE 350.

    FRE 350 is dual-listed with FRE 230.

    (Not offered 2015-16.)

  
  • FRE 363 - Québec: Literature, Society, and Culture


    Instructor
    Kruger

    Study of questions concerning Québec society. Focus on texts, events, and movements that have shaped this dynamic and diverse French-speaking society. Typical authors include Poulin, Hébert, Proulx, Chen, Micone, Lalonde, and Hémon.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered French 220 or above. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 364 - Paris Noir/Black Paris


    Instructor
    Fache

    This course examines the lives and works of artists and intellectuals from Africa, the African Diaspora and the US in Paris (1920-1960).


    Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.
    Satisfies a requirement in French & Francophone Studies major and minor.
    Satisfies an elective requirement in Africana Studies major. 

    Prerequisites & Notes
    FRE 212 Oral Expression or FRE 222 Introduction to Literature or FRE 260 Contemporary France

  
  • FRE 366 - Africa Shoots Back, in transl. (=AFR 266)


    Instructor
    Fache

    Africa Shoots Back examines West African cinema from its beginnings in the early 1960s to today.  The selection of films exposes students to new voices, perspectives and representations of Francophone West Africa from a West African perspective.  We will discuss issues of decolonization and post-colonial cultural economy, as well as analyze traditional African narrative strategies and new and unconventional images.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Visual and Performing Arts.

  
  • FRE 368 - France and Métissage


    Instructor
    Fache

    Course explores the concept of métissage in the contemporary French literary context.

    Satisfies distribution requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.

    Prerequisites & Notes
    Any course numbered 220 or above. (Not offered 2016-17.)

  
  • FRE 389 - European Union Politics


    Courses on topics related to francophone civilization (e.g., culture, history, politics) taken at a university in a French-speaking country.

    European Union Politics counts an an elective for the Political Science major.

    Satisfies the Liberal Studies Distribution Requirement.

  
  • FRE 390 - Studies in Civilization and Culture Abroad


    Courses on topics related to francophone civilization (e.g., culture, history, politics) taken at a university in a French-speaking country.

  
  • FRE 395, 396, 397 - Independent Study for Majors


    Individual work under the direction of a faculty member who reviews and approves the topic of study and determines the means of evaluation. 

  
  • FRE 490 - Joséphine Baker


    Instructor
    Fache

    The senior seminar will look into French society through the life of jazz entertainer and WWII resistant Joséphine Baker.

     

    Prerequisites & Notes
    (Fall 2016)

  
  • FRE 491 - Senior Thesis


    An in-depth study of a literary theme, genre, movement, author, or topic of civilization in close consultation with a faculty adviser. Required of all senior majors in the spring semester, except those students enrolling in 499 Senior Honors Thesis.

 

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