This class will look at classic movies about movies to see what themes they raise about film as art form, story-telling, film as narrative, and the conflict between art and economics in the mainstream industry. Film screened will include Sunset Boulevard, Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954), Singin’ in the Rain’, Robert Altman’s The Player, Truffaut’s Day for Night, and Woody Allen’s s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

This course will serve both students thinking about a medical career, and students who might be patients in the health-care system. Our premise is this: narrative skills are essential for the delivery of excellent medical care. The core skill: how to read and interpret well the stories of patients, their bodies, and their cultural contexts. Close reading and listening means understanding codes, subtexts, narrative form, and institutions; it means tolerating ambiguity, and listening for complex relationships. And who is the “informed” or “competent” reader of medical narratives? The outcome of these skills should be more subtle diagnoses, and a broader application of care across peoples: that is, broader social justice outcomes.Also fundamental to the course are Atul Gawande’s ideas about the roles medical professional play and the questions they ask. These roles are not neutral, and play a key role in developing effective and human patient care. 1 unit. No prerequisites.

Described by The New York Times as a “writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything,” novelist, short-story writer, and essayist David Foster Wallace dramatically changed the face of contemporary fiction. In this course, we will explore Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction, focusing both on his use of language and on the philosophical ideas that inform his writing. We will also critically examine Wallace’s often problematic depictions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in his works.

Anton Chekhov defined the genre of the modern short story--minimal exposition, rejection of dogmatism, meticulous economy of detail, plot integrated with characterization, and open endings. Class time will be devoted to close readings of Chekhov's stories, as well as viewings of Russian film adaptations of his works. We will also learn about Chekhov's life in the context of the then current cultural and ideological trends. Taught in English. No prerequisites.

In this course, we explore how Shakespeare’s plays, and adaptations of them, represent systems of power, resultant inequities, and sites of resistance. We also examine the systems of power that have produced Shakespeare’s plays and their cultural status. “To study Shakespeare is to study power” (Kim F. Hall)—not only the operations of power within the plays, but the power at work in institutions (the theatre, the university) that produce Shakespeare as an authority on “universal” human experience. This course will equip you to challenge the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius and to explore “Shakespeares” as multiple, contested, contingent, and evolving, including through the study of contemporary, resistant appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays.

This class will look at the history and themes of great movie thrillers. We will start early (1930) and go late (2017), and look at key elements of form and content in our films: from the heist film, to the political thriller, the police procedural, Hitchcock, the drama of the final girl, and race and the thriller. Throughout, our films raise important political and existential questions. Suspense in great movies is always “about” something. We’ll look a little at genre theory, and a lot at film form: why does Lang or Hitchcock or Jordan Peele do this with the camera, with the lighting, with that graphic match. Another que

This course will serve both students thinking about a medical career, and students who might be patients in the health-care system. Our premise is this: narrative skills are essential for the delivery of and receiving excellent medical care. The core skill: how to read and interpret well the stories of patients, their bodies, and their cultural contexts. Close reading and listening means understanding codes, subtexts, narrative form, and institutions; it means tolerating ambiguity, and listening for complex relationships. There will be a major focus on health equity and health disparities in this course. As a result the class will fulfill the Equity and Power (US) general education requirement. Stories work in two ways to channel power and access to health care: one, narratives told by less privileged people get mis-heard and interpreted through certain cultural filters; two, health care providers and institutions tell their own stories about class and “race” and gender that continue implicit and explicit biases. All our skills in close reading and understanding narrative will come to bear on this project to decode and interpret these complex stories. Texts include Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” two hospital movies, “The Hospital” and “Magnificent Obsession,” and “Wit” (Emma Thompson).

How storytelling emerges, becomes centered or moved to the fringe, and how it is reframed for different audiences means understanding the creative process at every turn. In this course, students will engage in a multitude of creative works with the expectation of explaining and reflecting on their own approaches and the types of knowledges needed to complete their assignments. Revision assignments will ask students to tell their story in new forms and to examine what gets lost or found in telling their story. Reading in this class will focus on texts from minoritized and marginalized writers/storytellers to examine how equity and power structures influence and enable which forms and aesthetics dominate the literary landscape.