Courses
Miss Deirdre
Selection of RIT Courses
Visionaries in Motion IV (fall, 2010)
COS 1099-559-01 or COLA 0520-449-01
Co-directed with COS faculty, Dr. Gary Skuse
Interview three fall “visionary” speakers over lunch–Matt Crawford,mechanic/philosopher; Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and Jeanne Gang, architect. Read works, view videos by the three Gannett speakers; attend pre-interview guidance sessions; conduct lunch discussions; attend evening talks. Discussions are videotaped and posted to the Gannett website www.cwgp.org
Dates for lunch interviews: Wednesday, Sept 8, 29, Oct 20
Truth and Consequences: Studies in Disciplinary Evidence
COS and COLA, Spring, 2007
Part of the Caroline Werner Gannett Project
A cross-disciplinary look at what evidence is, and how it needs to be properly collected, sifted, evaluated and preserved. What constitutes “evidence” in legal, criminal, historical, scientific, journalistic, medical, geographic, art and aesthetic realms? What methods and standards are employed for gathering and evaluating evidence in different disciplines? What are definitions and varying boundaries of such evidence? What is its relevance? Has the construction of evidence changed historically? How is evidence preserved and passed on?
These and other questions inform presentations of over a dozen RIT and other faculty. Carefully focused questions shape each lecturer’s talk. Readings and electronic/visual materials accompany each presentation. Students are invited to work with comparative presentations and encouraged to develop skills in critical evaluation and judgment. Students will work on one or two experiential projects of their choice developed by participating faculty. Outside speakers, films and two roundtable discussions that intersect issues central to the individual presentations are included in this course.
The Cognitive Revolution: Studies in Evolutionary Science
(co taught with Kristen Waterstram-Rich, 2006-2007)
Direction of students in readings and videotaped interviews with speakers in the Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture Series, 2006-2007 (for lectures and student interviews see www.rit.edu/~cwg/)
Autobiography
0504-490-01
According to poet James Merrill, we live in the age of “me-moir,” at least in American culture. But what happens to the quarrel between truth and fiction, to the forms of language, community and self-representation, as we move outside of England and America? This course explores the range of contemporary autobiographical practice in a rich spectrum of life-writings. We examine works from formal autobiography and memoir, to selections from diaries, journals and other writings. Included are visual portraits in art, photography and film. Through diverse cultural representations of “life-writing,” we trace new modes of constructing identity, as we redefine the boundaries of race and ethnicity, family, nation, class and gender.
Students have the opportunity to work both solo and collaboratively, in the classroom, family and community. Requirements include choice among oral presentations, creative and critical writing.
Maps, Spaces and Places
504-493-01
Space speaks! Diverse writers, critics and filmmakers represented in this course are rethinking space as a dynamic context for the making of history and for different organizations of social and communal life. We begin with a meditation on the language of maps and mapmaking, both antique and digital, exploring the idea that to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell lies. Among our initial questions, consider these: how do certain interests–absences as well as presences–come to be embodied in mapmaking? How do films and literary texts—poems, novels, memoirs—imaginatively construct space? In what ways, particularly in texts, do mapmaking and power mutually reinforce various kinds of social authority, yet deny others? How can we begin to rethink race, class, gender and sexuality in terms of the “natural authority” asserted in space? Focusing such questions, the course offers an opportunity for a solo or collaborative project on digital or antique mapping, technical work on some aspect of Geographical Information Systems, plus a final project on “Reading RIT or Rochester as Text.”
The course takes as its premise the critical importance of spatial thinking, particularly in science, engineering, mathematics and technology—the STEM disciplines–but also informing our ability to understand spatial visualizations and become spatially literate in many areas of 21 st century culture.
Spring ’06 texts (supplemented by a packet of optional readings and handouts):
Click here to view full course syllabus.
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Obasan, Joy Kogawa
Selections from Annie Proulx’ Close Range and Bad Dirt (Wyoming stories 1 and 2)
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-96, Seamus Heaney
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich
Films:
“A Perfect Corpse” (BBC)
Anthony Minghella, “The English Patient”
Ang Lee, “Brokeback Mountain”
The Novel: Banned, Burned and Transgressive Novels from across the Globe
0504-443-01
This course is designed to explore the origin and rise of printing and “the novel,” but also to familiarize students with a selection of world literatures that have been banned and burned on religious, social and political grounds. We begin with a selection of richly illustrated overview lectures on the history of the novel and the rise of printing/illustration, offering a context for the extensive and varied censorship history of creative works in the past four centuries: from “prior restraint” issues in Milton’s Aeropagitica (“The Second Defense of the People of England”) and Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), through Joyce’s Ulysses, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Salman Rushdie’s various attempts to clarity the meaning and intent of Satanic Verses, as he faced the Ayatollah Khomeni’s fatwah calling for the author’s execution.
Texts for the course ( Fall, 2004)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
Sozaboy, Ken Saro-Wiwa
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
An Obedient Father, Akhil Sharma
The course also provides the opportunity to view selected artistic and cultural materials from exhibits, museums and art collections that have prompted various kinds of censorship in the twentieth century, including works by Paul Cadmus, Robert Mapplethorpe and others.
The Art of Poetry
0504-441-01
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present in its hoo-hoo-hoo
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano. (“Mozart, 1935” by Wallace Stevens)
The official description reads: “emphasizes the enjoyment and study of poetry with primary attention to major poetry in English. ” This course explores a wide range of poetry, from formal verse to online poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy to contemporary performance and hip-hop poets. We begin with essays by Robert Pinsky and Dana Gioia, as well as “toolbox talks” on various elements of poetry. Groups such as Harlem Renaissance poets, the ‘confessionals,’ contemporary women poets, environmental poets and a brief selection of international poets are included in the readings. Among the course objectives are these:
To examine closely a range of poetry not only for the “world within the word,” but also for the social and historical contexts that motivate the poems;
To learn new interpretive strategies, challenging ways of reading poetry that bring pleasure and emotional satisfaction, as well as political awareness and social responsibility;
To encourage a range of responses to poetry: small group exchanges; short essays; longer research papers; creative responses and performance pieces;
To move poetry outside the classroom, increasing awareness that “poetry is everywhere.”
Students have available a number of audiocassettes (“Language of Life” series) poetry videos (PBS “Voices and Visions,” or “Power of the Word”), poetry websites and online materials. Additionally, there is opportunity to attend and participate in a number of poetry events, both within RIT and the wider community.
COURSES TAUGHT OUTSIDE OF RIT
Grinnell College
Crosscurrents in Twentieth Century Literature
Why Poetry? Why Now? (Frosh Tutorial)
Gender, Feminisms and Critical Theory
The Left Bank Revisited: Paris in the 1920’s (interdisciplinary)
Gender and the Politics of Translation
The Female Body (Senior Seminar- Gender and Women’s Studies Program)
Sites of Struggle: Introduction to Women’s Studies (interdisciplinary)
SUNY – Binghamton
Literature of the Twenties
British and American Women Writers since 1900
Automythologies: Three Women Writers
Silence and Power: The Woman Writer and the Modernist Canon
Canadian Women Writers
Women’s Life Cycles in Literature, Sociology and History (team taught and interdisciplinary)
Modern British Literature (graduate)
Feminist Critical Theory (graduate)
Notre Dame University
The Collegiate Seminar (interdisciplinary classics program)
The Freshman Seminar (interdisciplinary)
Images of Women in Literature and Theology (interdisciplinary; with Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza)
Introductory Seminar: The Program on Non-Violence