Course Descriptions for Fall 2013

The Bad Girls of Fiction: WSGS 201 / ENGL 204

Murder, chaos, and mayhem litter the texts we will study in this class. Over the course of the semester we will look at the figure of the bad girl in novels, short stories, and films. Our discussions will center on what these figures can tell us about cultural expectations, definitions of normality, and audience expectations. When do these figures cross the line from amusing to threatening? What can they teach us about courage, carelessness, and creativity? What themes, images, tropes, and conventions appear, reappear, mutate, and fixate in the texts we will study? These will be the questions that will fuel our discussions this fall.

Women and Christianity: WSGS 202 / THEO 201

This course provides a survey of the Old and New Testament views of women and a history of the status of women in the Roman Catholic and Major Protestant traditions with emphasis on the contemporary role and spirituality of women in Christianity. The course will examine attitudes about gender and perspectives on women as influenced by the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, major Christian theologians, Christian mystics, and women who have made important contributions to the Christian tradition or have been instrumental in transformations that promote the full dignity of women and men.

Love and Violence in Roman Poetry: WSGS 235 / CLSX 235

This course will introduce students to representations of love and violence in the elegiac, didactic, epistolary, and epic poetry of the Augustan poet Ovid. The complicated representations of women as both objects and agents of erotic desire and aggression have led readers to label Ovid a misogynist as well as a proto-feminist. Through close readings and discussions of his texts, students will be encouraged to explore issues of sex and gender in the Augustan Age, according to Ovid, and as translated into his poetry. Students will also work to analyze Ovid's poetry on its own terms, giving attention to the relationship between genre and content.

Race, Gender, and Crime: WSGS 369 / SOCI 369

This course examines how different races, genders, and social classes experience crime, both as offenders and victims. Prerequisite: Any 100-level Sociology course.

Sex, Myth, and Media: WSGS 421 / JMA 421

This course will examine the role of mass media in reinforcing or challenging common cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity and power relationships between the sexes. In analyzing various mass media-including print, television, Internet publishing, electronic games, and film-we will apply gender theory and connect these artifacts to their historical moment. Students' own experiences, insights, questions, and ideas are a key part of this course. Throughout the term, we will consider not only what is in terms of gender roles but also what might be.

Inside and Outside the Bluestocking Circle: Exploring 18th Century Women's Writings and Literary Support Systems: WSGS 451W / ENGL 450W-01

Senior Seminar, Engish majors only

There is no question that women writers such as Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Carter benefitted both personally and professionally from their involvement in the literary salon of the time, referred to as the blue stocking circle, but not all women writing and publishing in the 18th century were invited into or wished to join or were able to participate in such a group. Literary women outside the blue stocking group, including such writers as Charlotte Lennox, Frances Brooke, and Charlotte Smith, for example, managed successful careers with the help of other kinds of support and often under financial, geographic, or familial constraints that made belonging to the London-centered, upper class blue stockings impractical or undesirable. This course explores the nature of the blue stocking circle as it evolved over the course of the second half of the 18th century, and examines how it either worked as a support system or was bypassed for other kinds of literary support systems, including the male dominated literary and dramatic circles headed by Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and David Garrick. We will read poems, novels, essays, and plays by women inside and outside the blue stocking circle, as well as study their lives and times, in an attempt to understand the relation between the writer, her work, and the literary context in which she wrote.

Requirements include presentations on the lives and works of these writers, presentation of critical articles, class participation, a short paper, a long paper, and an exam.

Psychology of Gender: WSGS 453 / PSYC 453

In this course we will explore what it might mean to be a woman, a man, or something in between or outside of those possibilities. We will consider gender from a variety of vantage points, including those of biology, culture, race, psychoanalysis, psychopathology, and mythology. Goals for the course include rich conversation about the varieties of our gendered world and the further development of our individual perspectives on what it means to be a gendered subjectivity.