Course Descriptions

ENG 386 - American Fiction: 20th Century

A study of realist, modernist, and postmodernist American fiction that is not only set in the past, but actively questions the ability of fiction writers to adequately capture and depict the spirit of another time. Major authors: Wharton, Faulkner, Vonnegut, Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Morrison, Roth. Readings include fiction, criticism on major texts, and theory that deals with the relationship between historiography and fiction. An upper-division elective intended for majors but open to non-majors.

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 387 - Modern American Poetry

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 388 - Contemporary Theatre

Instructor
Fox

Despite our highly visual and multimedia age, we don’t often think of the stage as being a site of significant cultural conversation.   Yet there is simply no substitute for the vitality and importance of live theater.  To paraphrase Edward Albee, theater puts the mirror up in front of an audience and asks them: “This is who you are. Now what are you going to do about it?”

This course will examine the origins and development of contemporary theatre in the Western tradition, post-1960, with an emphasis on American and British drama. We will particularly place a heavy emphasis on drama of the last two decades, examining the ways in which recent theater has asked its audiences to contemplate issues of concern to contemporary life including race in America; global violence against women; class division; and the commodification of international relations.  We will also discuss how theater challenges us to find creative solutions through connection, community, and claiming identity.  

We will read work by playwrights including (but not limited to): August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka​, Jez Butterworth, Tony Kushner, and Ayad Akhtar. 

Satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 389 - Studies in Literature and the Environment

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

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 391 - Literary Criticism

Analytic and comparative reading of major critical texts.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

 

ENG 392 - Literature of the American South

In this course students explore works by eleven southern women writers including Dorothy Allison, Harriet Arnow, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Sheri Reynolds, Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward, and Eudora Welty. Together we will encounter narratives that challenge our understanding of public and private histories and impel us to consider both theoretically and personally the effects of gender, race, class, and region on creative expression and the stories that unfold.  We will question the texts, their contexts, and ourselves, always acknowledging Welty’s assertion that “there is absolutely everything in fiction but a clear answer.”  The course will include both lecture and discussion. 

Counts toward the English major, the Gender & Sexuality Studies major, and the Africana Studies major.
Satisfies the distribution requirement in Literary Studies.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser
 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 393 - A: Studies in Literature and the Visual Arts: A: Film Genres or B: Love and Art or C: or D: Word Art

393A Film Genres

Instructor
Kuzmanovich

Originally a means of market differentiation, film genres now are sets of conventions with emotional payoffs, that is, formal devices that promise “repetitive reaffirmation of certain ritualistic experiences” (Gehring).  In other words, film genres are about business, art, and technology.  But they seem to me also about ways of creating or recreating emotions.  In this course we’ll look at the formal and psychological markers as well as cultural consequences of a number of film genres that create, recreate, and thus keep certain emotions in circulation. 

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

393B Love and Art

Instructor
Kuzmanovich

This is not a course in which we parade our pain or give advice to the lovelorn. But it is an immodest and wholly foolish undertaking.  And an ambitious one, too:  though it’s mostly literary analysis it is also part philosophy, part psychology, part history, part film theory, part creative writing and filmmaking.  For to begin to speak of love is to speak of desire, beauty, goodness, creation, immortality (Plato), psychic anatomy and anatomical memory, prophetic dreams, conscious irrationality, obsession, transgression, suffering, repression, sublimation (Freud), selfhood, otherness, will to power, slavery, mastery, surrender (Hegel, Sartre, De Beauvoir), prostitution (Marx and Engels), male conspiracy (Firestone),   Lines between  eros, philia, nomos, agape, and theoria grow faint and not only because they happen to be Greek words and thus equally strange. Appetites sometimes merge and sometimes squabble with reason and spirit.  Loving oneself, loving others, loving God, loving God in others, passion, intimacy, commitment, these states bring up only the first questions: Who/what should be loved? How does a lover choose a/the beloved? What causes love? What does love cause? Egotism? Idealism? Self-knowledge? Marriage? Companionate marriage? Partnership? The sense that the lovers are heroes/heroines of their own stories which they can finally tell? If one’s love is a story, or becomes a story, what is the genre of that story? Does love become a story only in love’s absence? Is love good? Is love a good? Is there a hierarchy of loves and lovers? What connects love to sexual desire? Do causes and connections differ among cultures and historical periods? What differentiates falling in love from being or staying in love? All of these are good philosophical questions and psychological categories, but talking about love philosophically or treating it as something amenable to psychologizing invariably causes us, as the philosopher Arthur Danto said in the Chambers Gallery, “to lose touch with the reality everyone cherishes.”

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

393C Film Theory

Instructor
Miller

This course explores theoretical approaches to fiction and nonfiction film, television, video and other media. After discussing theories of documentary we will make short videos. We then consider “ists” and “isms,” including realism and reality TV, modernism, postmodernism, materialism and the digital, and Freudianism and gender theory. Students have the option to make a longer video as a final project. Movies we will consider: Modern Times, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Bicycle Thieves, Shane, Out of the Past, No Country for Old Men, Man with the Movie Camera, Un Chien Andalou, and a variety of shorter videos.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

393D Word Art

Instructor
Churchill

We live in an age of visual culture.  To be literate, we need to read and interpret words and images, as well as the interactions between them.  We also need to be able to read, write, and communicate online. This course examines print and digital texts that combine words and images, but it is not a course in mass communications. Instead, we’ll study some of the most complex and subtle word/image interactions, including:  ekphrasis, the verbal representation of a visual presentation; illuminated books; graphic novels, and digital stories. Read and write about each genre, and then try creating your own.  The course is a double hybrid–word/image texts and critical/creative writing–designed to stimulate your critical and creative faculties, and improve your communication skills. The course itself will inhabit the digital realm: the course hub will be a website; you will write for web publication; and you will design your own Davidson Domain to showcase your work throughout your career at Davidson.

(Offered Spring 2016.)

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of the instructor required.

ENG 394 - A: Studies in Modern Literature or B: Fictions of Empire

Instructor
Vaz

British imperialism permeated the literary tradition much as it did the globe.  In this course, we will examine the fictions and critiques of empire constructed in and through literary texts from the eighteenth century through the present.  We will read these texts through the lens of postcolonial theory, so we can better grasp the ideology of British colonialism and its after-effects.

(Offered Fall 2015.)

394B Studies in Modern Literature

Instructor 
Staff

Special topics in modern literature such as The City Novel, Modern International Fiction, Contemporary Poetry, Literature and Medicine, Contemporary Drama and Disability Literature.

Students entering 2012 and after:  satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

 

 

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

 

ENG 395 - Independent Study in Literature

ENG 396 - Independent Study in Writing

ENG 397 - Independent Study

ENG 400 - Seminars

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 401 - Seminar

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 402 - Seminar

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

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 or Novel

“Sexy”, in the course title refers to provocative, intriguing, inspiring, and/or compelling. It does not refer to pornography.
During the first three weeks of the course, each writer will read a novella and a novel. One of these texts will be selected from a list of major literary contest winners that the professor provides; the other is of the student-writer’s own choosing. These selections are intended to inspire the student-writer’s creativity. Starting in the fourth week, students will begin producing five pages or more pages of strong fiction so that by the end of the term, each writer will have written at least fifty solid pages of the first draft of a novella or novel. Writers should be prepared to write often, to discuss their work with others in the seminar, and to be open to critiques that are intended to help them create compelling fiction.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 415 - Poetics of Relation

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 and Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor credit.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 420 - Narrative Theory

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.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 443 - Seminar: The Canterbury Tales

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.”

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 452 - Seminar: Radio Shakespeare

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.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 455 - Renaissance Revenge

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.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 462 - Seminar: Romantic Radicalism

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

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.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

 

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 21^st-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 21^st-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. 

(Offered Fall 2015.)

 

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)

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Juniors and Seniors only.  Students entering 2012 and after: Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirements.

ENG 473 - Seminar: Picturing Texts, Making Media

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

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 and Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor credit.
Counts for cultural diversity requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 485 - American Women Poets

A study of four women poets (Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds) - their work and its critical reception.  Student participation and leadership are essential.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

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

(Fall 2015)  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.
 

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.

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.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 487 - Seminar: Legal Fiction

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.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

ENG 493 - Seminar: Film Art

No special knowledge of film or video technology is presumed. A course on film (X through film,  X and film, the X of film, film as X, X on film, film X, etc.)  should be decent preparation for this class; an upper level course in art, creative writing, literature, semiotics, or literary criticism would also be of even greater help. 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered Fall 2015.)

Limited to juniors and seniors.

ENG 494 - Seminar: A: Disability and Literature or B: Multicultural Literature

494A Disability and Literature

Instructor
Fox

In this course, we will explore disability as it is depicted in literary and cultural texts, from the canon to disability culture.  

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirements.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

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.

(Not offered Fall 2015.)

Prerequisites & Notes
Juniors and seniors only.

ENG 495 - 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 requirement in English

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered Spring 2016.)

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

ENG 498 - Seminar: Senior Honors Research

ENG 499 - Seminar: Senior Honors Thesis

ENV 120 - Introduction to Environmental Geology

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 201 - Environmental Science

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.

Major credit in Environmental Studies. 
Counts toward interdisciplinary minor in Environmental Studies.

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

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.

Major credit in Environmental Studies.
Counts toward interdisciplinary minor in Environmental Studies.
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

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.

Major credit in Environmental Studies. 
Counts toward interdisciplinary minor in Environmental Studies.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

ENV 210 - Introduction to Environmental Literature: Food Literature

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

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 a major requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies a distribution requirement in Liberal Studies

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

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 Medical Humanities.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in 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 lab 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 (=MHU 233)

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 Medical Humanities.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Natural Science distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Science with lab 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

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 a major requirement in Environmental Studies.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Environmental Studies.
Satisfies Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

ENV 240 - Indian Environment and Ecology

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. The course is taught in the field by travelling from ecological site to ecological site. The course will conclude with a two-week residency at the Visthar organization outside Bangalore, during which students will consider and explore the ethical and political dimensions of the process of environmental change in south India.

Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Environmental Studies.
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

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 is needed now more than ever. 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.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Social Sciences Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 256 - Environmental History

This course covers environmental interactions large and small, tracing the changing ways that Americans have shaped and thought about the places where they live and work. Course focuses on US environmental history from the colonial period to the present, including national parks, preservation, conservation, and wilderness; the relationship between the US and the rest of the world; and debates over what nature is, who it is for, and how it should be used.

Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies a major requirement in History

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies the Historical Thought distribution requirement

ENV 271 - Agriculture and Development: Reading the Green Revolution

Examines the role of the 20th-century “Green Revolution” in context. Reviewing proposed solutions to poverty and hunger amid unprecedented population growth, this course uses Historical Demography, Anthropology, History, and Development Studies to understand regional and global change, and consider debates in communities of “Experts” and “Others”.

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

ENV 272 - Human Geography (= SOC 272)

Human geography is the study of multifaceted and dynamic relationships between people and places. Complex interactions and interdependencies of societies provide a basis for the study of humans in various landscapes. This course offers understandings of how people’s lives are influenced by the places that surround them and how they, in turn, create and change those places. Fundamental geographic concepts will help make sense of our globalizing world and its implications for our everyday lives. We will explore a range of geographic topics, as well as some concepts and methods used in geographic study. This course is a lecture and discussion course designed to provide students with concepts and ideas that are foundational to the study of the geography of human systems. The course features cartographic and social science concepts to support students in their geographic knowledge and analysis of seven broad themes: spatial perspectives; population and migration; cultural patterns and processes; political organization of space; agriculture, food production, and rural land use; cities and urban land use; industrialization and economic development. No prerequisites are required.

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

ENV 282 - Water and Development

This course introduces students to critical studies in water and development.  Drawing from anthropology, history, and development studies, readings will consider complex stories of regional and social change, as well as debates in the communities of “Experts” and “Others.” Includes a wide variety of regions, sources, and thematic approaches.  Environmental Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.

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

ENV 315 - Analytical Chemistry I (= CHE 220)

CHE 220 - Introduction to Analytical Chemistry

Topics in chemical equilibrium, electrochemistry, 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.

Prerequisites & Notes
Chemistry 115. One laboratory meeting per week. (Spring)

ENV 325 - Regional Geology

Detailed exploration of the geology of a region of North America, including a field trip to the area during the entirety of Spring Break. Before the trip, the class will broadly examine the geology of the area, including landforms, surficial processes, crustal evolution, tectonic settling, and petrology. Students will choose a geologic subject that can be visited as part of the trip itinerary and present their project on location. Students will learn how interrelated processes in geology create the landscape that we view today.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of the instructor is necessary in order to enroll in the course. Additionally, students are expected to have taken ENV 120, ENV 201, or ENV 230, though exceptions may be made.

ENV 330 - Surface Geology and Landforms

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.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Natural Science distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Natural Sciences and Mathematics distribution requirement.
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

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 340 - Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

From 17^th-century curiosity cabinets to A Night at the Museum, artifacts and specimens have offered their collectors, curators, and viewers access to multiple ways of understanding the natural world. In this environmental humanities seminar, we’ll explore the history of natural history, collecting, and display in a range of times and places, past and present. Using materials and approaches drawn from environmental history, science and technology studies, anthropology, and museum studies, we’ll grapple with key questions about American culture: What do we collect and why? What makes something a specimen? What are natural history collections for? How is scientific knowledge produced? What do our displays reveal about who we are? What is curation? We’ll consider dinosaur bones and taxidermy, field books and habitat dioramas, and objects from Davidson’s collections as we examine the ways exhibits tell stories and offer arguments-and craft our own. 

Satisfies the philosophical and religious thought requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies environmental humanities credit.

ENV 352 - Sustainable Development in India (= POL 352)

This course explores India’s quest for development, with special focus country’s rapid economic growth since 1990, and the tension between growth and environmental protection. The course is designed exclusively for the Semester in India program, and includes extensive fieldwork in India on both development and the environment. Cross-listed with Environmental Studies.

Students entering 2012: satisfies Social Science distribution requirement.
Satisfies cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Social Sciences Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a major requirement in Comparative Politics.
Satisfies Asian Studies and International Studies interdisciplinary minor requirement.

ENV 356 - Diversity and Extinction

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

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)

BIO 366 - Renewable Natural Resources: Science & Policy (= ANT 382)

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.

Prerequisites & Notes
Successful completion of BIO 112/114, ANT 101, ENV 201, or ENV 202 is required.

ENV 367 - Ecotoxicology (= BIO 367)

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 373 - Urban Geography (= SOC 363)

Urban landscapes differ dramatically from other spaces on the planet in their physical structure, economic base, governance patterns, and intensity of social interactions. Cities are often characterized by striking inequalities in income distribution, social and spatial mobility, access to resources, and forms of cultural expression. Conflicting social forces and economic processes make urban areas vibrant and complex phenomena, and cities are often presented as both the problem and the solution for a sustainable future. This course introduces analysis of contemporary urban systems, with an emphasis on spatial and geographic patterns and processes. We will examine the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the development of U.S. and international cities, as well as the centrality of urban system development in the evolution of local and global political economies. Lectures, discussions, and field trips will provide both theoretical frameworks and contextualized experiences of urban social life. Our examinations of the changing economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics of cities will focus on a wide range of topics, including economic processes, governmental management, urban form, land use, housing, migration, transportation, socioenvironmental justice, and political ecology, among others. No prerequisites are required.

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

ENV 375 - Political Ecology

Political ecology integrates environmental sciences across multiple scales to analyze the dynamic relationships between society and resources, environmental outcomes resulting from social structures, and the environmentally-mediated interactions between and within social groups. It understands environmental problems as rooted in processes operating at different nested scales, local to global. Political ecology places human environments in terms of biophysical processes that shape and sustain them, and physical environments in terms of social, political, and economic practices that help shape their material forms. It frames local resource use systems within “nests” of processes that help shape them, including political economy, globalization, gender relations, and historically produced “narratives.” This class is an opportunity to think critically about ecological processes in relation to social, cultural, political, and economic processes, as well as in relation to space, place, and scale. The class offers students a critical understanding of the institutions that regulate interactions between society and nature at local, national, and international scales.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
ENV 272, ENV 373, or instructor approval required.

ENV 498 - Environmental Studies Capstone

The Environmental Studies capstone experience requires each student to complete a comprehensive research project within a two- course sequence during the senior year.  In collaboration with their capstone mentor, students will formally propose and carry out a project based on fieldwork and/or substantive library research.  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. 

Satisfies major requirement in Environmental Studies.

Prerequisites & Notes
ENV201, ENV202, ENV 203.  Seniors only.

ENV 499 - Environmental Studies Capstone

The Environmental Studies capstone experience requires each student to complete a comprehensive research project within a two- course sequence during the senior year.  In collaboration with their capstone mentor, students will formally propose and carry out a project based on fieldwork and/or substantive library research.  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. 

Satisfies major requirement in Environmental Studies.

Prerequisites & Notes
 

ENV201, ENV202, ENV 203.  Seniors only.

ETH 236 - Ethics and Warfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
Students entering before 2012:  satisfies Fine Arts distribution requirement.

FMS 385 - Video Game Music (= MUS 385)

MUS 385 - Video Game Music

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 a major requirement in Music. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Liberal Studies distribution requirement. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Fall)

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

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

FRE 102 - Elementary French II

FRE 103 - Intensive Beginning French (2 credits)

FRE 201 - Intermediate French Through Cinema

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

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

Prerequisites & Notes
French 201, placement examination, or permission of the instructor.

FRE 220 - Portraits of Women

Literature treating portraits of women in French and Francophone texts, films, music, and painting. Discussion of issues such as national identity, religion and morality, colonialism, and the status of women.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
French 201 or above. (Not offered 2015-16.)

FRE 221 - Visions of the City

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

Prerequisites & Notes
French 210 or above. (Not offered 2015-16.)

FRE 222 - Literature and Revolt

Literature treating the theme of social, moral, metaphysical, or political revolt.  Typical authors:  Gide, Mauriac, Camus, Ionesco.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
French 201 or above. (Not offered 2015-16.)

FRE 223 - Childhood and Youth

FRE 224 - Innocence and Awareness

FRE 225 - Rich and Poor

FRE 226 - Geographies of Desire

Desire is a passion that has driven men and women to build and destroy empire, 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.

FRE 227 - Games People Play

FRE 228 - Introduction to Francophone Literature Abroad

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

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

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

FRE 230 - Québec Through Film

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 2015-16.)

FRE 241 - Poetry, Passion, Painting

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. (Not offered 2015-16.)

FRE 260 - Contemporary France

FRE 287 - Studies in Civilization and Culture Abroad

FRE 288 - Studies in Civilization and Culture Abroad

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

FRE 313 - Written Expression, Advanced Grammar Review, Translation and Composition

Advanced work in written French.

Prerequisites & Notes
French 220 or above. (Spring)
 

FRE 320 - Husbands, Wives, and Lovers

FRE 321 - Autobiographies, Journals, Diaries

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. (Not offered 2015-16.)

FRE 322 - North Africa in Novel and Film

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 2015-16.)
 

FRE 327 - Asia in Novel and Film

FRE 329 - Studies in the Novel

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

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

FRE 330 - French Drama

FRE 340 - Symbolist Poets: Drugs, Music, Revolt

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 2015-16.)

FRE 341 - Poetry, Passion, Painting

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. (Not offered 2015-16.)